At least three people were killed and several injured after a gunman opened fire at a packed mall in the capital Copenhagen. Among the injured, three are said to be in critical condition.
The police said that they have arrested a 22-year-old Danish resident, indicating that he was the sole person involved in the mass shooting.
They said that the motive of the 22-year-old “ethnic Dane” remain unclear, adding that he was known to the police “but only peripherally”.
“He’s not someone we particularly know,” Copenhagen police chief Soren Thomassen told a news conference on Sunday.
He said the victims included a man in his 40s and two “young people,” without giving details. Several others were injured, three of them critically, he said.
On social media, people had been speculating about a racist motive, or some other, but the head of the investigation said, ” I cannot say that we have anything which supports that at this moment.”
Police, however, confirmed that they were probing videos posted online which claimed to show the suspect with weapons and pointing a gun at his head.
According to witnesses, the young Danish man, armed with a large rifle, started shooting uniseriately at the large Fields shopping mall, located between the city centre and Copenhagen airport.
He was arrested peacefully shortly after police arrived at the scene.
“Police arrested the suspect thirteen minutes after receiving the first emergency call about the shooting,” Thomassen said.
A spokesman for Rigshospitalet, Denmark’s largest hospital, told CNN that the hospital had taken in several victims and had called in extra staff to deal with the emergency.
A phone line for victims has been opened and police said they have set up a central location where eyewitnesses can get support and report their experiences to law enforcement officials.
In a statement on Sunday night, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen expressed sympathy, saying, “We have all been brutally ripped from the bright summer that had just begun. It is incomprehensible. Heartbreaking. Meaningless. Our beautiful and usually so safe capital was changed in a split second.”
Sunday’s gun attack is the worst in Denmark’s history since February 2015, when a 22-year-old man was killed in a shootout with police after going on a shooting spree in the capital that left two people dead and five police officers wounded.
The shooting comes a week after a mass shooting in neighbouring Norway, where police said a Norwegian man of Iranian origin opened fire during a LGBTQ festival, killing two and wounding more than 20.
(With inputs from agencies)
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