Danish PM Defends Freedom of Speech After Attacks

TIME World Denmark Danish PM Defends Freedom of Speech After Attacks "We must insist on acting as we do. Think and talk like we want to. We are who we are"

The Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt has insisted that the series of shooting attacks in Copenhagen will not alter the countrys belief in the freedom of speech.

They want to violate our freedom of speech, they want to violate our belief in religious freedom, she said at a press conference on Sunday.

Its time for unity in Denmark. The coming days will be tough to get through. We have to understand what has hit us, but we must insist on acting as we do. Think and talk like we want to. We are who we are.

Police continued their investigation after a gunman who had already killed one person and injured three officers in an attack on a panel discussion dedicated to free speech, struck again on Sunday morning, this time killing another and injuring two outside the citys main synagogue. Hours later, in a dragnet the likes of which this peaceful Nordic city has never seen, the shooter himself was shot dead by police.

The attacks began just after 3:30pm on February 14. A gunman armed with an automatic weapon sprayed a caf in a cultural center in the eastern part of Copenhagen with bullets killing 55-year-old documentary filmmaker Finn Nrgaard and wounding three members of security forces. At the time, the caf was hosting a discussion on freedom of expression, that included among its panelists the French ambassador to Denmark, Franois Zimeray, and Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist and art historian who has been the object of several assassination attempts since he published a cartoon in 2007 that depicted the prophet Mohammed as a dog. Vilks later told the press he was certain he was the object of the attack.

They fired on us from the outside. It was the same intention as Charlie Hebdo except they didnt manage to get in, Zimeray told Agence France-Presse. Bullets went through the doors and everyone threw themselves to the floor.

After finding the car in which the gunman had initially escaped, police fanned out throughout the city, erecting roadblocks and passenger controls at airports and train stations in an attempt to keep the perpetrator from slipping across the border to Sweden or Germany. But he hadnt gone that far. Just after 1am, a gunman fired shots in front of the citys main synagogue, wounding two police officers and one member of the synagogue who was controlling access to a bar mitzvah being celebrated by roughly 80 people inside. That member, 37-year-old Dan Uzan, later died of his wounds. Its what weve always feared, said synagogue president Daniel Rosenberg Asmussen in an interview with Danish television DR2. It is also what we have always warned could happen in Denmark.

Overnight, the center of the city was locked down, and police advised citizens to stay in their homes or, if they were already out, in the bars and clubs where they found themselves. Around 4 am, a suspect returned to an apartment in the northern part of the city that police had been monitoring since the afternoon. When police approached the man, he began firing at them. In the ensuing exchange of shots, the man was killed. We believe that the man shot by riot police this morning is the one behind the two attacks, said chief police inspector Torben Mlgrd Jensen at an early morning press conference.

The similarities between the Copenhagen shootings and the attack that took place in Paris last month in the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket were lost on no one. After the Charlie Hebdo event, we knew that there would be more attention directed toward the cartoon affair, says Lars Erslev Andersen, a senior researcher on terrorism at the Danish Institute for International Studies.

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Danish PM Defends Freedom of Speech After Attacks