COPENHAGEN: Danish police have arrested “some 20 people” suspected of involvement in extremist terrorism in a series of raids across the country, authorities said Wednesday.
Flemming Drejer, the operative head of the Denmark’s Security and Intelligence Service, said the suspects were “driven by a militant, Islamist motive.”
Copenhagen Police Chief Inspector Joergen Bergen Skov said some of them would be charged under the Scandinavian country’s terror laws on Thursday behind closed doors.
“Some had have procured things to make explosives and have tried to acquire weapons,” Bergen Skov told a joint press conference with the domestic intelligence service.
Drejer, the intelligence chief, said the arrests won’t change Denmark’s terror threat assessment, which “remains serious.”
“We look with great severity on a case like this one because it unfortunately confirms that there are people that have the intention and capacity to commit terror (attacks) in Denmark,” Drejer said.
Bergen Skov said police raided about 20 addresses in Denmark and six police departments across the country were involved. The raids and arrests were coordinated by the Copenhagen police.
No details were given as to what the target was or when an attack would take place.
Danish authorities have reported foiling several extremist attacks in recent years, including ones linked to the 2005 publication in a newspaper of 12 cartoons by various artists depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
A Danish court earlier this year gave a Syrian asylum seeker in Sweden a 12-year prison sentence for planning to explode one or more bombs in Copenhagen and stabbing random people with kitchen knives. Moyed Al Zoebi, 32, acted on behalf of the Daesh group, according to the Copenhagen City Court.
Al Zoebi had an accomplice, Dieab Khadigah, who was sentenced in Germany in July 2017 to a prison term of six-and-a-half years.
On Feb. 14, 2015, lone gunman Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein killed two people in separate shootings in Copenhagen, before being shot dead by police.
Denmark: Police foil suspected extremist terror attack plans
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Denmark: Police foil suspected extremist terror attack plans
- Police did not give an exact number for the arrests
- “We now have the situation under control.”, said chief of police Skov
Justice Department says it’s releasing 3 million pages from its Jeffrey Epstein files
- The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act
- “Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people,” Blanche said
NEW YORK: The Justice Department said Friday that it was releasing many more records from its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, resuming disclosures under a law intended to reveal what the government knew about the millionaire financier’s sexual abuse of young girls and his interactions with rich and powerful people including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents in the latest Epstein disclosure, as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
The files, which were being posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release of documents in December.
The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted after months of public and political pressure that requires the government to open its files on the late financier and his confidant and onetime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the act,” Blanche said at a news conference announcing the disclosure.
The prospect of previously unseen records tying Epstein to famous figures has long animated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and others who have clamored for a full accounting that even Blanche acknowledged might not be met by the latest document dump.
“There’s a hunger, or a thirst, for information that I don’t think will be satisfied by review of these documents,” he said.
He insisted that, “We did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect — or not protect — anybody,” Blanche said.
After missing a Dec. 19 deadline set by Congress to release all of the files, the Justice Department said it tasked hundreds of lawyers with reviewing the records to determine what needs to be redacted, or blacked out.
Among the materials being withheld from release Friday is information that could jeopardize any ongoing investigation or expose the identities of potential victims of sex abuse. All women other than Maxwell have been redacted from videos and images being released Friday, Blanche said.
The number of documents subject to review has ballooned to roughly six million, including duplicates, the department said.
The Justice Department released tens of thousands of pages of documents just before Christmas, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs and court records. Many of them were either already public or heavily blacked out.
Those records included previously released flight logs showing that Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet in the 1990s, before they had a falling out, and several photographs of Clinton. Neither Trump, a Republican, nor Clinton, a Democrat, has been publicly accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and both have said they had no knowledge he was abusing underage girls.
Also released last month were transcripts of grand jury testimony from FBI agents who described interviews they had with several girls and young women who said they were paid to perform sex acts for Epstein.
Epstein killed himself in a New York jail cell in August 2019, a month after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.
In 2008 and 2009, Epstein served jail time in Florida after pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18. At the time, investigators had gathered evidence that Epstein had sexually abused underage girls at his home in Palm Beach, but the US attorney’s office agreed not to prosecute him in exchange for his guilty plea to lesser state charges.
In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of his underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence at a prison camp in Texas, after being moved there from a federal prison in Florida. She denies any wrongdoing.
US prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse of girls, but one of his victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, accused him in lawsuits of having arranged for her to have sexual encounters at age 17 and 18 with numerous politicians, business titans, noted academics and others, all of whom denied her allegations.
Among the people she accused was Britain’s Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after the scandal led to him being stripped of his royal titles. Andrew denied having sex with Giuffre but settled her lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.
Giuffre died by suicide at her farm in Western Australia last year at age 41.
