Shooting in Copenhagen: “We ran for our lives”, witnesses tell of the attack on the shopping center – franceinfo

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 daughters were supposed to go see Harry Styles. They called me to say someone was shooting. They were in a restaurant when it happened,” Hans Christian Stolz, a 53-year-old Swede, told AFP. came to pick up his children there. “We thought at first that it was people who were running because they had seen Harry Styles, then we understood that it was people in panic (…) We ran for our lives”, adds his daughter , Cassandra. On Snapchat, the British singer said he was “shocked” and sent 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 shooting at franceinfo After the intervention of the police, the shooter was quickly arrested, without violence. The suspect is described as a 22-year-old “ethnic Dane”. His motives and his profile remain unclear: according to the police, he acted alone. According to Copenhagen police chief Søren Thomassen, the man is known to the 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 does not work”. His name has not been made public but Søren Thomassen confirmed that he was known “for a 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 selected victims, there is no indication that this is a terrorist act,” said the Copenhagen police chief.