COPENHAGEN – With baseball caps pulled low over their eyes and scarves wrapped tight around their mouths, the young men huddled at sundown to pay tribute to a killer.
Dozens had come to the scene where their “brother” was shot dead by police after he sprayed gunfire outside a cafe and a synagogue. Now they would give him a proper – and defiantly public – send-off: quiet prayers, followed by repeated chants of “Allahu Akbar” and the raised-index-finger salute of the Islamic State.
“May Allah show you grace,” read the handwritten sign they taped to the bullet-scarred apartment building where 22-year-old Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein fell. “Rest in peace, Captain.”
Hours later, an estimated 30,000 Danes held torches to the freezing Baltic wind in their own Monday evening commemoration – this one for Hussein’s victims. Swaying to the rhythms of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” they vowed not to bend to the gunman who claimed two lives over the weekend in the country’s first fatal terrorist attack in three decades.
“When violence and hatred hits Denmark, the answer is community and democracy,” Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt told the solemn and steadfast crowd.
But the earlier, far smaller gathering offered ominous hints of just how long and difficult this country’s struggle with violent extremism may yet prove to be.
Danish Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard told the BBC that the weekend’s attacks were believed to be the work of a “lone wolf,” a troubled young man who had already had multiple run-ins with the law and who had not acted in concert with a broader terrorist cell.
And yet authorities said Hussein was part of a network – a criminal gang called The Brothas that has traditionally traded in drugs and theft but whose members have lately been lured by the call of radical Islam.
Like Hussein, many are the sons of Middle Eastern immigrants who have struggled to find a place in modern Denmark, and who turn to the common bonds of gang life and religion to forge their identities.
“The Brothas is dominated by young men without an education who feel they are not accepted in society,” said Aydin Soei, author of Angry Young Men, a book about gangs and inner-city life in Copenhagen. “They are not good Muslims and they know it. But Islam is part of their identity. They have a group identity of everyone being against them and being underdogs. In that identity, Islam means something.”
Soei said he thinks he met Hussein in 2011 while conducting research in Norrebro, the ethnically and socio-economically diverse north Copenhagen neighborhood where Hussein lived – and, in the hours before dawn on Sunday, died.
A group of Brothas members he had run into asked Soei where he was from, and were instantly suspicious when he mentioned another Copenhagen neighborhood that’s home to a rival gang.
“They were really not happy about that,” Soei said. “That tells a lot about the gang war in Copenhagen.”
Turf battles over drugs and pride have led to sporadic outbreaks of violence. But they have mostly been limited to fist fights and the occasional stabbing.
“The gangs around here would get wiped out in one day by even some mediocre gang in the United States,” said Adeel, the manager of a Norrebro Internet cafe who declined to give his last name because he did not want the attention.
The cafe was raided on Sunday by police who believe Hussein may have paid a visit in between his attacks Saturday afternoon. Police also arrested and charged two people who they believe may have helped Hussein by “giving advice and assistance in connection to the shooting,” a police spokesman said.
Adeel said he did not know Hussein, but that gang members are occasional visitors at the Internet cafe – and often engage in petty neighborhood crime. “They’re local punks,” Adeel said.
Lately, however, Copenhagen’s gangs have taken on a more troubling cast as the line between criminality and extremist ideology has blurred.
Copenhagen gang leaders are among at least 110 Danes who have ventured to Syria and Iraq to fight in those countries’ wars. Intelligence services, meanwhile, have had to step up monitoring of the groups’ activities for fear of the sort of domestic terror attack that played out over the weekend.
Hussein had been on law enforcement’s radar for years, having graduated from small-time weapons charges to an assault conviction after stabbing a teenager on a commuter train in November 2013.
He was released from prison just two weeks before the weekend’s rampage, and the Danish media reported on Monday that prison officials had warned the country’s main security service that he may have become radicalized during his jail term. The security service, P.E.T., would not comment on that claim, and has declined to say whether Hussein was under surveillance before his killing spree.
His first target was a free speech forum on Saturday convened by Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who has been repeatedly targeted by radical Islamists for depicting the Prophet Muhammad. His second was the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen. In each attack, one civilian was killed, with police officers credited for preventing many more deaths.
The idea of Hussein as a terrorist was one that those who knew him in Norrebro had trouble squaring with the quiet and calm man they had known.
At the Thai kickboxing club where Hussein worked out and competed, his trainer said he was stunned by the suggestion that his onetime protege had been behind the killings.
“He didn’t talk too much, but he was a cool guy,” said the trainer, who declined to give his name because he did not want to be associated with violence. “Women train in here. Danes train in here. He was cool with everyone.”
