Denmark Boosts Security Near Israeli Embassy After Blasts

(Bloomberg) — Police in Denmark and Sweden are boosting security after two blasts rocked the area around Israel’s embassy in Copenhagen and a shooting occurred near its diplomatic mission in Sweden.

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Copenhagen police are looking into whether the explosions are linked to the embassy, as one of several avenues of investigation, Jakob Hansen, deputy police inspector, said at a news conference on Wednesday. Three people have been detained, two of them on a train at the Copenhagen central station.

“The Israeli embassy is in close vicinity and that is also an angle we’re pursuing at the moment,” Hansen said. “It’s too early to say if there are any links.”

“We are going to step up our presence in the area,” he said.

Separately, Swedish police confirmed that there had been a shooting near the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, after officers responded to reports of gunfire in the area late Tuesday afternoon. No one was hurt and no suspect has been detained.

The area is well covered by surveillance cameras and investigators are currently going through the evidence, a spokesperson for the Stockholm police said.

The incidents come as attacks in the Middle East escalate. Iran fired about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday in a reprisal after Israel carried out a dramatic series of attacks on Lebanon in recent days, killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a Beirut airstrike and sending ground forces across the border.

In a statement posted on Facebook, Israel’s embassy in Copenhagen said it was “shocked” at the explosions, and expressed confidence in Danish police’s efforts to investigate the event.

Sweden’s Security Service has earlier said that criminal gangs have been used as proxies by Iran to attack Israeli interests in the country, following two previous attempts at attacking the embassy. Authorities also said last month that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind a hacking operation aimed at deepening divisions in the Nordic country by sending thousands of inflammatory text messages.

The Iranian embassy in Stockholm has dismissed all allegations of involvement in attacks in Sweden as “false” and “baseless.”

–With assistance from Christopher Jungstedt and Charles Daly.

(Adds details on Copenhagen police detaining suspects in second paragraph)