Three people have been arrested in Denmark and one in the Netherlands on suspicion of planning a terror attack, Danish police have announced.
A cross-border operation early on Thursday morning saw arrests made in several locations across Denmark while a 57-year-old man was detained in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam at the request of German authorities.
Counter-terror units in both Denmark and Germany have open investigations regarding the suspect from the Netherlands, according to a police spokesperson as cited by RTL.
The political motivation for the foiled attack is not yet known, but it is understood the network had links to organized crime in Denmark and was affiliated with Loyal To Familia, a Danish street gang that was ordered to be dissolved by the Danish Supreme Court back in 2021.
“The investigation has revealed that a network of people has been preparing a terrorist act,” Flemming Drejer, chief superintendent of Denmark’s Security and Intelligence Service (PET), told a press briefing in Copenhagen.
“The arrests and the raids we’re carrying out today are based on an intensive investigation that PET has carried out in close cooperation with our partners abroad,” he added.
Asked about the incident at the European Council summit in Brussels, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said it was “extremely serious” and “shows the situation we are in in Denmark, unfortunately”.
“It is of course — in relation to Israel and Gaza — completely unacceptable for someone to bring a conflict elsewhere in the world into Danish society,” she continued.
“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,” Frederiksen added.
Thursday’s arrests are the latest foiled attacks across Europe amid a rise in extremist activity across the continent.
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Austrian police announced this week they had detained a 16-year-old boy on suspicion of planning a terror attack on a synagogue in Vienna. The teenager was found in possession of bomb-making manuals, weapons, and ammunition, and had several Islamic State propaganda videos on his cell phone including footage of executions.
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On Wednesday, French authorities arrested a 12-year-old schoolgirl from a family of Mongolian refugees after she took a knife to school and threatened to kill her teacher. According to testimonies from her classmates, the girl had boasted about wanting to emulate the Islamist terror attack in Arras during which 57-year-old Dominique Bernard was stabbed to death by a Chechen-born terrorist in October.
Late last month, two foreign nationals were also detained in Germany accused of planning to ram a truck into attendees of Cologne’s Christmas market.
