On the night of Wednesday 31 August 2016, two police officers were shot on Pusher Street in Christiania during an operation to arrest a known drug dealer.[1][2] One officer was left in critical condition while the other officer and a civilian wounded in the shooting were stable.[1] The suspected gunman, a 25-year-old named by local media as Danish national Mesa Hodzic, was detained and died on Friday 2 September from injuries sustained in an exchange of fire before his arrest.[1]
Police said Hodzic had links to the radical Islamist group Millatu Ibrahim and sympathised with the Islamic State, but found no evidence that extremism was behind the attack, which Islamic State’s Amaq outlet claimed as the work of its “soldier”.[1]
Residents dismantle the market
After a meeting stretching over several hours on Thursday night, residents decided to try to close the open-air cannabis market, which reportedly generated some one billion kroner in sales a year.[2] From about 9am on Friday, hundreds of residents began pulling down the stalls where men in masks peddled marijuana and hashish.[1][2]
Copenhagen police director Thorkild Fogde said the demolition was about organised crime and violence, not just hash, and he hoped it was an attempt to actively help the police.[1] Resident spokespeople warned they could remove the stalls but could not guarantee the trade would not return, after a 45-year-old market that had bounced back within hours of a police clearance that June.[2]
