Danish police arrest Syrian over planned 'terrorist' attack

STOCKHOLM: Danish police on Friday said they had arrested a Syrian asylum seeker from Sweden for “attempting to commit a terrorist act” in Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen police said they arrested the 30-year-old man jointly with the Danish Security and Intelligence Service on Thursday over a failed attack which he plotted with another 21-year-old man in November 2016.

“The man is charged with attempted terrorism for having, together with another man convicted in Germany, planned to randomly kill or hurt several people in an unknown location in Copenhagen,” the police said in a statement.

The police added the two men “wanted to attack people with knives and thereafter detonate one or several explosives, which failed when the accomplice was denied entry into Denmark and arrested by the German police”.

A German court in July convicted the 21-year-old, described as a Syrian refugee by the German media, for attempting an attack. He was reportedly carrying 17,000 matches, two kitchen knives and six walkie-talkies when the German police arrested him.

Earlier this year a would-be female militant was sentenced to eight years in jail for a planning to bomb two Danish schools. The Islamic State sympathiser, a Muslim convert, was just 15 years-old when she was arrested in 2016.