Omar el-Hussein, the 22-year-old Danish man shot dead by police after supposedly carrying out the worst attack on Danish soil for decades, was a petty criminal with a past seemingly full of contradictions. He was a smart student but reportedly had a short fuse and was prone to violence. He was a talented kickboxer and yet appeared to have suffered from anxiety and used cannabis.
Believed to have been born in Copenhagen to Palestinian parents who left a refugee camp in Jordan to come to Denmark, he spoke fluent Danish and Arabic and, local media reported, was always quick to debate the Palestinian issue.
Hussein has been widely named by local media as the Copenhagen gunman. Danish intelligence services have suggested the fatal Copenhagen shooting of a film-maker at a freedom-of-speech debate and a Jewish security guard at a synagogue may have been a copycat of last month’s Paris attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. If that was the case, Hussein would have had to have followed those Paris attacks from a Danish prison, where he was serving a two-year sentence for stabbing a 19-year-old man on Copenhagen’s inner-city train system. He had been released from prison only two weeks before the attacks in Copenhagen at the weekend.
It is not yet clear whether he became radicalised in prison like the men behind the Paris attacks. But Michael Gjorup, head of the country’s prison and probation service, told Danish media that authorities had noticed changes in his behaviour in prison and had alerted the intelligence services.
Details on Hussein’s upbringing in Copenhagen remain sketchy. A court psychiatric assessment of him carried out during the stabbing case, and obtained by Danish TV2, showed him telling psychologists he had a happy childhood and good relations with his parents and a younger brother. However, he did not graduate from school, was unable to get into a university and later was homeless.
Although it was not clear where he had lived after leaving prison, he was well-known on the low-rise, red-brick Mjølnerparken estate in north-west Copenhagen, where police had raided an apartment at the weekend searching for weapons. Behind the peeling paint of the front door, the stairwell was graffitied with black pen and strewn with litter. Past the children’s play areas of the estate, Emilie Hansson, 26, who is half Swedish, said she knew Hussein and had seen him at the estate last week. She said: “For me he’s not a terrorist. He’s someone who felt finished with life and decided to go out with a big bang.” An 18-year-old at school nearby said he thought those who knew Hussein had been shocked he could have carried out the attacks.
Most of the families living on the estate have immigrant roots. “Foreign-origin families have all been lumped together here by politicians,” said one local who did not want to be named. But the neighbourhood has slowly been gentrifying as young people priced out of the city centre move nearby.
The Mjølnerparken estate and other streets nearby have been known for gang problems in recent years, largely turf wars between different immigrant groups and other motorcycle gangs, mostly related to issues of who controls local cannabis-dealing. The gang standoffs are believed to have calmed in recent months, but criminality persists. It is not clear how deeply Hussein might have been involved in local gangs, known as the “boys”, or whether he moved between various gangs. Some local media suggested he had been rejected by gangs and had not fitted in. But he had been known to police for fights in the Nørrebro district, the multiethnic working-class and gentrified area where he is thought to have spent time since leaving jail, and where he was shot dead by police on Sunday as he returned to an address under surveillance.
The Politiken newspaper quoted unnamed friends of Hussein who said he was passionate in political discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was always keen to discuss the conflict and was quick-tempered. He had previously been arrested in possession of a long knife and a knuckleduster with a metal spike.
Before his jail sentence, Hussein had been a rising star at Copenhagen’s Muay Thai kickboxing club, which is tucked behind a kindergarten in a series of graffitied buildings with a vast spray-paint portrait of a boxer under the sign The Temple 4 Talentz.
Denmark has a problem with young men leaving to take up arms in the Middle East. With more than 100 young jihadis emerging since 2012, the country has produced one of Europe’s highest levels of fighters per head of population and some key figures leaving have been linked to Copenhagen’s criminal gangs. But Hussein had not been abroad to Syria or Iraq.
The question remains whether or not he was part of a wider group and whether others helped him organise the attacks. Two men arrested on Sunday have been charged with aiding Hussein by helping him evade police and get rid of a weapon during the manhunt which ended in his death.
At the Power Play internet café on a busy street in Nørrebro, which police had raided on Sunday, detaining four people and seizing CCTV footage, the 35-year-old Danish manager of Pakistani origin, said: “I’ve never seen the suspect in here. Mjølnerparken is a pretty criminal area and there are local gangs, young guys come in here when they’re bored, principally to do gaming and waste time. They’d be playing action games like Battlefield, Call of Duty, but I’ve never had the sense it was a terrorist hotbed round here. The biggest problem round here is crime and gangs dealing hash.” Behind the till, there were rows of crisps and sweets and a coffee machine with hot chocolate; a fish tank embedded into the wall looked down over rows of computers. The manager said the internet café staff were helping police with inquiries.
Hussein’s former headteacher Peter Zinkernage told Danish public broadcaster DR that he was a “talented and smart student”.
A classmate, named as Julie, told AFP: “He sometimes behaved pretty aggressively, but otherwise he was nice and very smart. He had good grades at school, he had friends and he was a good classmate.” She added: “He worked out in the yard, he was strong.”