Copenhagen blast suspect ‘very likely’ from Chechnya, police say

Copenhagen – A man believed to have set off a bomb in a Copenhagen hotel last week was probably a Belgian resident of Chechen origin, Danish police said Wednesday.

“We are not 100 percent sure of his identity but we think it is very likely that he is Lors Dukayev, born in 1986 in Chechnya and now living in Belgium,” the inspector in charge of the investigation, Svend Foldager, told reporters.

Belgian police had searched his residence overnight, he added.

Danish police published new pictures of the suspect on Tuesday in a bid to collect more information on the man, who has refused to identify himself.

Danish authorities were still uncertain of the man’s identity because Belgian police did not yet have the DNA profile or his finger prints, Foldager said.

“There is still work ahead of us to confirm his identity with certainty and to confirm the motive for his act,” he added. “Danish and Belgian police will now investigate possible links with extremist movements.”

According to Danish police, Dukayev is a boxer who has lived in the eastern Belgian city of Liege for the past five years.

Two Belgian newspapers and a Danish daily on Wednesday reported the suspect was a Chechen living in Liege, where he was known in local boxing circles.

His former trainer from the local “Boxing Club Cocktail de Droixhe,” an area of Liege, recognised him from the pictures released by Danish police, Danish daily B.T. said.

“It’s him. It’s L.D. He is Chechen and has trained at the club for about five years,” Albert Syben told B.T, which did not publish the suspect’s full name.

Syben added he had not seen the boxer “for about eight months.”

He had spoken to the suspect’s girlfriend, said Syben. “She said he had left for Luxembourg last week, but that she hasn’t been in touch with him since,” he added.

Belgian daily La Meuse said the man, described as “having a boxer’s nose,” was a 27-year-old from Chechnya, where he lived with his mother, and that he travelled frequently, notably between Chechnya, Germany and Belgium.

The man Danish police detained is suspected of having set off an explosion in a bathroom at the budget Joergensen Hotel in the centre of Copenhagen on Friday.

Police arrested the suspect in a park near the hotel shortly after the blast.

He appeared in court last week on crutches, with the lower part of one leg missing and with injuries to his face.

The blast may have been planned for another location, police said, adding it remained unclear what the motive for the attack was.

Denmark has been considered vulnerable to Islamist attacks since 2005, when a major daily newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that outraged many Muslims.

AFP / Expatica