Copenhagen killer a petty criminal

Omar El-Hussein, the 22-year-old Danish man shot dead by police on Sunday after supposedly carrying out the worst terror 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 kick-boxer 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.

El-Hussein has been widely named by local media as the gunman behind the two attacks in Copenhagen on the weekend.

Danish intelligence services have suggested the fatal shooting of a filmmaker at a freedom of speech debate and a Jewish security guard at a synagogue may have been a copy of last month's Paris attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.

If that was the case, El-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.