The Guardian reports: Danish intelligence services have suggested the fatal Copenhagen shooting of a film-maker at a freedom-of-speech debate and a Jewish security guard at a synagogue may have been a copycat of last month’s Paris attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. If that was the case, Hussein would have had to have followed those Paris attacks from a Danish prison, where he was serving a two-year sentence for stabbing a 19-year-old man on Copenhagen’s inner-city train system. He had been released from prison only two weeks before the attacks in Copenhagen at the weekend.

It is not yet clear whether he became radicalised in prison like the men behind the Paris attacks. But Michael Gjorup, head of the country’s prison and probation service, told Danish media that authorities had noticed changes in his behaviour in prison and had alerted the intelligence services.

Details on Hussein’s upbringing in Copenhagen remain sketchy. A court psychiatric assessment of him carried out during the stabbing case, and obtained by Danish TV2, showed him telling psychologists he had a happy childhood and good relations with his parents and a younger brother. However, he did not graduate from school, was unable to get into a university and later was homeless.

Although it was not clear where he had lived after leaving prison, he was well-known on the low-rise, red-brick Mjølnerparken estate in north-west Copenhagen, where police had raided an apartment at the weekend searching for weapons. Behind the peeling paint of the front door, the stairwell was graffitied with black pen and strewn with litter. Past the children’s play areas of the estate, Emilie Hansson, 26, who is half Swedish, said she knew Hussein and had seen him at the estate last week. She said: “For me he’s not a terrorist. He’s someone who felt finished with life and decided to go out with a big bang.” An 18-year-old at school nearby said he thought those who knew Hussein had been shocked he could have carried out the attacks. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The Copenhagen police said on Sunday that they had shot and killed a man believed to be behind two attacks that killed two people, one at a cafe and one outside a synagogue.

The first attack took place on Saturday, when a gunman sprayed bullets into the cafe where a Swedish cartoonist [Lars Vilks] who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad was speaking. Hours later, early Sunday, a man was shot outside the city’s main synagogue, according to the police.

One man was killed in the cafe attack and three police officers were wounded; a man was shot in the head in the second attack and later died, and two officers were wounded, Danish television reported. In each case the gunman escaped, raising fears throughout the city — the capital of Denmark — and setting off a police manhunt.

Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt called the shooting at the Krudttoenden cafe a terrorist attack and said that the nation was on high alert. “We feel certain now that it was a politically motivated attack, and thereby it was a terrorist attack,” Ms. Thorning-Schmidt said.

Later Sunday, Jørgen Skov, a police inspector, said at a news conference in Copenhagen that the police had shot and killed the suspect after he opened fire on officers near the Norrebro station. Mr. Skov added that there was no indication other suspects were involved, but that the investigation was continuing. [Continue reading…]

The Local reports: The suspected gunman in two fatal shootings in Copenhagen may have been inspired by the Islamist attacks in Paris a month ago, Danish police said Sunday.

The man, who was killed in a shootout with police earlier in the day, “may have been inspired by the events that took place in Paris a few weeks ago,” Jens Madsen from the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) told reporters.

The man may “generally have been inspired by militant Islamist propaganda issued by IS [also known as Isis or Islamic State, ed.] and other terror organisations,” Madsen said.

Christopher Dickey adds: In Scandinavia, the history of cartoons taunting Muslims by caricaturing Muhammad dates back almost a decade, to September 2005 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons by different satirists. Local Muslims were offended, but it was governments in several Muslim countries encouraging and orchestrating protests that turned the controversy into a firestorm. More than four months after the publication, in February 2006, protesters tried to burn down the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus. The same embassies were attacked in Beirut. Soon, more than 50 people had been killed in related violence in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

In Denmark itself, Islamic organizations took Jyllands-Posten to court, claiming that the Muhammad cartoons were an offense against all Muslim people, but they eventually lost the case.

Against this background, Lars Vilks, a run-of-the-mill artist in Sweden, published a rough sketch in an obscure local newspaper in Orebro that picked up on a curious phenomenon of the time — mysterious sculptures of dogs appearing in the grassy centers of traffic circles. He drew the turbaned head of Muhammad on one such “roundabout dog.” Again, governments in Muslim countries made official protests while anger on the streets of those countries grew.

In the years since, the cartoonists and editors responsible for the Jyllands-Posten publications have lived under constant threat, and so has Vilks.