Police in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) announced on Thursday afternoon that they arrested four people on suspicion of planning a coordinated terrorist attack in the country. Danish police said that the four have "connections to people abroad," and Ynet learned that the attack they planned was intended to hit Israeli and Jewish targets.
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According to security officials in Denmark, one of the suspects was arrested in the Netherlands, and the rest were arrested in Denmark itself. Danish police announced that for the time being they do not intend to raise the terror alert level in the country, which is currently at level 4 out of 5, but emphasized that they will increase security in public sites, especially in the capital Copenhagen and around Jewish institutions.
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Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Copenhagen, Denmark
(Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Emil Helms/ רויטרס)
PET has for more than a decade warned against potential terror attacks, and since 2010 has kept its terrorist alert level at 4 on a scale from 1-5, reflecting a "significant" threat.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who is currently at the European Union summit in Brussels, said that the terrorist plan that was thwarted Thursday morning is a very serious incident that shows the high risk that Denmark faces. "It is of course unacceptable, in the context of Israel and Gaza, that there are those who import conflict from somewhere else in the world into Danish society," she said.
She called the the terror attack threat "extremely serious," and added: "For a number of years now, we have seen that there are people living in Denmark who do not wish us well. Who are against our freedom and who are against Danish society, with all that it entails."
Earlier this month, senior officials in the European Union warned that Europe faces a very high threat of terrorist attacks during the Christmas holiday, due to the consequences of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Denmark has already known Islamist terrorist attacks and attacks on Jewish institutions in the past. In 2015, a Danish Muslim citizen murdered two people and injured five others at a synagogue in Copenhagen.
In the last year, Denmark has faced the threat of Islamist attacks following the protests held there and in Sweden over activists who burned copies of the Quran to test the limits of freedom of expression. This month, the Danish parliament approved a bill making it illegal to burn the Quran in public, after it sparked violent protests in Islamic countries.