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Here are reports on the Danish 'terror' attacks Trump says weren't reported

Justin Cremer
Justin Cremer - [email protected]
Here are reports on the Danish 'terror' attacks Trump says weren't reported
A police officer lays flowers outside the Krudttønden cultural cafe in Østerbro following the February 2015 terror attack. File photo: Claus Bjorn Larsen/AFP/Scanpix

In an escalation of his self-declared “running war with the media”, US President Donald Trump and his administration have accused the Western media of conspiring to avoid coverage of terrorist attacks.

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“Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland, as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino. And all across Europe, you’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. And it’s gotten to the point that it’s not even being reported and in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that,” Trump said while addressing members of the military in Florida on Monday. 
 
Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer later walked back his boss’s claims a bit by saying that Trump administration thinks certain attacks haven’t “gotten the coverage [they] deserved”. In an attempt to back this claim, the White House released a list of 78 terrorist attacks that Trump felt didn’t get proper coverage. 
 
These included the widely-reported attacks in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo office and the Bataclan concert venue, the Nice truck attack and the Berlin Christmas market attack. The list also included the following three incidents in Denmark, all of which were reported by The Local and others. 
 
The February 2015 attack on a cultural centre and synagogue. In the February 14-15 attack, Omar El-Hussein, a 22-year-old Danish citizen of Palestinian origin, fired at least 30 shots at a free speech event featuring Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, killing 55-year-old filmmaker Finn Nørgaard. El-Hussein then killed volunteer security guard Dan Uzan outside of Copenhagen’s Great Synagogue before being shot and killed by police. A quick search shows that The Local has published 89 articles about the attack and its aftermath
 
The September 2015 stabbing of a police officer at a Danish asylum centre. A stateless Palestinian who was due to be expelled from Denmark was arrested for trying to kill a Danish police officer in a stabbing attack at Center Sandholm, Denmark's largest institution for asylum seekers. The officer survived and it later emerged that the 25-year-old perpetrator “may be radicalized and have sympathy for the Islamic State” and that he had previously sprayed Sweden’s justice and migration minister, Morgan Johansson, with a fire extinguisher during a visit to a housing project for refugees. 
 
 
The August 2016 police shooting at Christiania. In the late hours of August 31st, two police officers and a civilian were shot in what police said was a drug bust gone awry at Pusher Street, the notorious open-air cannabis market in the Copenhagen enclave of Christiania. 
 
One officer was critically injured but broadcaster DR reported two weeks ago that he was expected to be released from the hospital soon. The other two injuries were not serious. 
 
The suspected gunman, 25-year-old Mesa Hodzic, was later shot and killed by police.
 
While Islamists tried to claim that Hodzic was a “soldier of the Islamic State” and Copenhagen Police said he had links to the radical Islamist group Millatu Ibrahim, police said there was no evidence that extremism inspired the shooting.
 
Copenhagen Police confirmed to The Local on Tuesday that they still had no evidence to suggest it was a terror attack, while Magnus Ranstorp, an internationally renowned terrorism expert and researcher at Sweden's National Defence University, said that it's quite normal for Islamists to claim Western terror attacks after the fact.
 
"They want to appear to be omnipresent, to be eveywhere," he told The Local. 
 
Police said that Hozdic, who came to Denmark from Bosnia and Herzegovina aged four, was an established player in the Christiania drug trade, which is largely controlled by organized gangs. Police raids are common on Pusher Street, as are clashes between officers and dealers, but this was the first fatal incident involving police. 
 
The shooting led to Christiania residents tearing down the permanent cannabis stalls at Pusher Street in an attempt to stop sales in the alternative enclave, which was founded by squatting hippies in the 1970s and has a long history of openly selling cannabis. While police say that the lucrative cannabis market took a serious hit after the removal of the stalls, marijuana and hash are still sold openly on Pusher Street. 
 
A quick search shows that The Local has published well over 80 articles about the incident and the impact it had on Christiania and its cannabis trade. 
 
The White House list may have been hastily prepared as it misspelled 'Denmark' as 'Denmakr', 'San Bernardino' as 'San Bernadino' and 'attacker' as “attaker”. 
 

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