COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) – Two Swedish teenagers were jailed Thursday in pre-trial detention in connection with two predawn explosions in the vicinity of the Israeli Embassy in Copenhagen a day earlier. Prosecutors said investigators were establishing “whether the motive could be a terror attack.”
No one was injured in the blasts on early Wednesday in a neighborhood with several foreign diplomatic missions, though the nearby Jewish school was closed following the explosions.
The pair, who cannot be identified under a court order, were ordered held for 27 days. They faced preliminary charges of possessing illegal weapons and carrying five hand grenades. Two of the grenades blew up when the suspects threw them at a house near the embassy, prosecutor Søren Harbo said.
“This was pretty close to the Israeli Embassy,” Harbo said before Thursday’s court hearing. The explosions caused damage to a roof terrace of a nearby house. The diplomatic mission was not harmed.
Thursday’s hearing was held behind closed doors after the preliminary charges were read. Reporting from inside the court room, Danish broadcaster DR said the teenagers, aged 16 and 19, are suspected of acting “in association and together with prior agreement with one or more perpetrators.”
Both denied the charges, local media reported.
The two suspects were arrested Wednesday shortly before noon on a train at Copenhagen´s central station. Danish media ran photos of a man in a white hazmat suit being taken away by police on a train platform at the station. A third suspect, aged 19, who had been arrested near the embassy, has been released, police said Thursday.
In Denmark, the charges are one step short of formal charges and allow authorities to keep criminal suspects in custody during an investigation.
Separately, shots were fired late Tuesday at the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm. No one was injured. No arrests have been made.
The Danish domestic security service, known by its acronym PET, said that “Swedish authorities have assessed that at least one specific act directed at the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, which was carried out by young criminals in Sweden, has links to Iran.”
In May the Swedish domestic security agency SAPO accused Iran of using established criminal networks in Sweden as a proxy to target Israeli or Jewish people. The announcement came after the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm was sealed off in late January after what was then described as “a dangerous object” was found on the grounds of the diplomatic mission. Swedish media said the object was a hand grenade.
In a statement, PET said, “if we have a state actor who gets young criminals to carry out actions aimed at Jewish targets in our neighboring country, then we can be concerned that this will also happen in Denmark.”
In Stockholm, the operative of Sweden´s domestic security agency SAPO, Fredrik Hallström, said “the latest incident at the Israeli embassy is not classified as a terrorist crime at the moment.” His counterpart at the Swedish police´s National Operations Department, Johan Olsson, told the same press conference that the charges were of “aggravated weapons offenses, causing danger or other serious illegal threats and damage.”