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Gang, immigrant turf war shatters calm in Denmark |
By Slim Allagui
M’BOSSARAN Ciss still feels knots in her stomach when she recalls the night a stray bullet zipped through a window during dinner at a friend’s apartment in Copenhagen.
“Two minutes earlier, I was standing at the window right in the path of the bullet and I could have died,” the Guinean dancer told AFP.
The bullet went through the living room window before lodging in the wall just above the door.
Denmark’s accustomed calm has been brutally shattered in recent weeks, as a violent turf war has escalated between Hell’s Angels bikers and youths of immigrant origin with a raft of shootings across the capital.
The bullet that interrupted Ciss’s dinner party on October 11 had been fired by a member of an immigrant gang who was being chased through the streets by three men in a car.
In the past two months alone, police say there have been 25 shootings in Copenhagen’s otherwise peaceful streets, leaving one person dead and six injured from both sides.
“It’s a miracle that no innocent bystander has been hurt in these very worrying clashes,” Copenhagen police spokesman Flemming Steen Munch told AFP.
There appear to be numerous motives for the repeated attacks.
“There is the control of the lucrative drugs market, ‘turf’ protection, jealousy (and) soiled honour that they want to wash clean with blood,” Munch said.
Gang members were also seeking “vengeance in line with the principle of ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’”, he added.
Ciss’s near-death experience was not the first time an innocent bystander narrowly escaped injury or death at the hands of the rival gangs.
“On several occasions we just barely avoided a tragedy,” Munch said, stressing that “we are doing everything we can to stave off the worst”.
The long-simmering conflict between the two gangs exploded into full-blown war after a 19-year-old man of Turkish origin named Osam Nuri Dogan, who was armed and wearing a bullet-proof vest, was executed on the street on August 19.
His body was riddled with 25 bullets in front of a Copenhagen pizza parlour.
A member of Hell’s Angels suspected of the killing was arrested but was soon released for lack of evidence.
Since then, the violence and the often racially-loaded insults flung between the two camps have grown.
In an attempt to stem the clashes between Hell’s Angels, its offshoot AK81 and the gangs of mainly third-generation immigrants, police have launched a vast operation in Copenhagen and in the western town of Aarhus and central town of Odense, seizing “over 200 illegal fire arms”, according to the justice ministry.
“More than 3,000 searches of people and vehicles have been carried out, dozens of search warrants have been issued in these circles and some 40 people have been taken into preventive custody,” the ministry said in a statement.
Justice Minister Brian Mikkelsen has also vowed to put “massive pressure on the gangs”.
“We will not accept such settling of scores in Denmark ... because our citizens must be able to move safely around in the streets,” he told reporters.
Despite the massive police action, the violence has continued.
Last week shots were fired at the Hell’s Angels clubhouse in Copenhagen and between two cars in the heavily-immigrant neighbourhood of Noerrebro. No one was injured.
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently called for sending even more police into the streets, insisting on the need to “immediately bring an end to this fighting”.
He cautioned that allowing the violence to continue could result in it spilling over into “societal clashes between Danes and immigrants in general”.
This is why “we are fighting both the motorcycle gangs and the criminal immigrants who are contributing to the lacking security in our cities”, Rasmussen said.
While all the political parties have expressed their concern over the mounting violence, the centre-left opposition insists the government bears part of the responsibility for the increase.
“The government has failed in its social efforts and in long-term integration efforts, which could have helped avoid having these youths join gangs,” Karen Haekkerup, a spokeswoman for the opposition Social Democrats, said.
Police acknowledge that they are losing the battle to halt the violence.
“It’s mission impossible. We hope that our efforts will at least help lessen the violence,” Munch said. – AFP |
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