It was 5:30 p.m. on Sunday July 3 when a 22-year-old man, armed with a rifle, opened fire on customers in a large shopping center in Copenhagen. Three people were killed, several others injured, three of them in critical condition.
The shootings caused a movement of panic within Fields, this large shopping center located between the city center of Copenhagen and the airport, while many people were present on the scene, a few hours from the concert of the British star Harry Styles, scheduled for an adjoining room, which was canceled in the evening.
“My girls were supposed to go see Harry Styles. They called me to say someone was shooting. They were in a restaurant when it happened”told AFP Hans Christian Stolz, a 53-year-old Swede who came to pick up his children there. “We thought at first it was people running around because they saw Harry Styles, then we realized it was people in panic. (…) We ran for our lives”, adds his daughter, Cassandra. On Snapchat, the British singer said to himself “shocked” and addressed his prayers to “all those affected by the shooting”.
From the first shots, more than a hundred people rushed outside the shopping mall, others hid inside. A witness says: “We were about to order food, then we heard gunshots. Two, three, four shots.”
“I told my daughter who was sitting down to lay on the floor, and then we rushed into the disabled toilet. We closed the door, and we were there for maybe an hour and a half.”
A witness to the shootingat franceinfo
After the intervention of the police, the shooter was quickly arrested, without violence. The suspect is described as a “Ethnic Danes” 22 years old. His motives and his profile remain unclear: according to the police, he acted alone. Copenhagen police chief Søren Thomassen says the man is known to authorities “but only peripherally” and “There is no indication that he had any accomplices”.
Videos that have been circulating since Sunday evening on social networks are considered authentic by the police. The shooter appears there, posing with weapons, miming suicide gestures or evoking treatment with a powerful drug prescribed in psychiatry “which doesn’t work”. His name has not been made public but Soren Thomassen confirmed that he was known “for psychiatric history”.
Witnesses said that during the shooting, the man would have remained calm, without ever running. He would even have tried to trap his victims by explaining to them that his weapon was fake to encourage them not to move away. The three dead are a Danish boy and girl, both 17, and a 47-year-old Russian living in Denmark, according to police sources. “Our analysis is that these are randomly chosen victims, there is no indication that this is a terrorist act”said the chief of police of Copenhagen.