Danish police arrested a 27 year-old man late Sunday after finding him with weapons, a kilo and a half of explosives and all the ingredient...
Danish police arrested a 27 year-old man late Sunday after finding him with weapons, a kilo and a half of explosives and all the ingredients needed for a bomb, a police spokesman told AFP.
“It was the explosives and detonators to make a bomb, but it was not a bomb in itself. He had all the ingredients,” Detective Chief Inspector Claus Vinther of the Copenhagen police told AFP.
Asked if police thought the find could be linked to a terror attack, Vinther said: “No, we don’t think so.
But he added: “We don’t know what he was planning to do or trying to do or if he was holding it for someone else.”
Police stopped the man in his car for a traffic violation. When they spoke with him they suspected he was driving under the influence of drugs and so searched his car.
“In the trunk of his car, we found this one and a half kilos (3.3 pounds) of plastic explosives, detonators,” four hunting rifles, two shotguns and ammunition, Vinther said.
An earlier media report had mentioned only half a kilo of explosives.
The trunk also contained some elements of a Danish police uniform.
Vinther said the man arrested, a Danish national of Danish ethnic origin, was not a police officer. While he was known to them, it was not for any major crimes.
“He’s not gang related, he’s not related to any organised crime that we know of. Our suspicion might be that he is holding it or transporting it for someone else,” he said.
In recent years, a series of gang-related incidents, pitting the Hells Angels biker gang against rival immigrant gangs, has rocked the Danish capital and the area around it, but no one has been killed since late 2009.
Denmark has also been on alert following a series of incidents related to the publication in 2005 of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.
Its intelligence agency warned in November last year that it had “renewed indications that terrorist groups (were) looking to send terrorists to Denmark to commit terrorist attacks.”
A month later, Danish and Swedish intelligence agencies said they had foiled a plot to massacre staff at the Jyllands-Posten daily. The newspaper published a dozen cartoons of the Prophet in 2005, triggering violent and sometimes deadly protests around the world.
Four men, three of them Swedish citizens, are in custody in Denmark awaiting trial over the affair.
“It was the explosives and detonators to make a bomb, but it was not a bomb in itself. He had all the ingredients,” Detective Chief Inspector Claus Vinther of the Copenhagen police told AFP.
Asked if police thought the find could be linked to a terror attack, Vinther said: “No, we don’t think so.
But he added: “We don’t know what he was planning to do or trying to do or if he was holding it for someone else.”
Police stopped the man in his car for a traffic violation. When they spoke with him they suspected he was driving under the influence of drugs and so searched his car.
“In the trunk of his car, we found this one and a half kilos (3.3 pounds) of plastic explosives, detonators,” four hunting rifles, two shotguns and ammunition, Vinther said.
An earlier media report had mentioned only half a kilo of explosives.
The trunk also contained some elements of a Danish police uniform.
Vinther said the man arrested, a Danish national of Danish ethnic origin, was not a police officer. While he was known to them, it was not for any major crimes.
“He’s not gang related, he’s not related to any organised crime that we know of. Our suspicion might be that he is holding it or transporting it for someone else,” he said.
In recent years, a series of gang-related incidents, pitting the Hells Angels biker gang against rival immigrant gangs, has rocked the Danish capital and the area around it, but no one has been killed since late 2009.
Denmark has also been on alert following a series of incidents related to the publication in 2005 of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.
Its intelligence agency warned in November last year that it had “renewed indications that terrorist groups (were) looking to send terrorists to Denmark to commit terrorist attacks.”
A month later, Danish and Swedish intelligence agencies said they had foiled a plot to massacre staff at the Jyllands-Posten daily. The newspaper published a dozen cartoons of the Prophet in 2005, triggering violent and sometimes deadly protests around the world.
Four men, three of them Swedish citizens, are in custody in Denmark awaiting trial over the affair.
