COPENHAGEN — Danish police arrested three people in Copenhagen on Friday who were allegedly involved in plotting a terror attack.
The arrests were made at two addresses in the Danish capital and searches were also carried out at several locations within the city area, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) said in a statement.
The three arrested — a 22-year-old Jordanian national, a 23-year-old Turkish national and a 21-year-old Danish citizen residing in Egypt — were provisionally charged with illegal possession of automatic weapons and related ammunition.
They were also thought to be in the process of preparing a terrorist act.
All three will appear later at court in Copenhagen for custody hearings.
The investigation was carried out by the PET and Copenhagen police.
It comes as four men are currently on trial in Denmark over a suspected terror plot to massacre the staff of a newspaper that first published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Sahbi Ben Mohamed Zalouti, Munir Awad and Omar Abdalla Aboelazm — all Swedish citizens of Tunisian, Lebanese and Moroccan origin, respectively — along with a Tunisian national living in Sweden, Mounir Ben Mohamed Dhahri, pleaded not guilty to charges of “attempted terrorism.”
Prosecutors say the four were plotting to “kill a large number of people” at the Jyllands-Posten daily’s offices in Copenhagen when they were arrested Dec. 29, 2010. The newspaper published a dozen cartoons in 2005 of the Prophet Muhammad that triggered violent and sometimes deadly protests around the world.