Bad Deeds
- January 2nd, 2010
- Posted by EUEditor
Contributing to events that have detracted from New Year holiday celebrations: another multiple shooting in Finland; the execution in China of a British man believed to have been mentally ill; and a fresh threat against the “Mohammed†cartoonist in Denmark.
FINLAND SHOOTING
Peaceful Scandinavia had to take stock of the New Year’s Eve shooting of six people including the gunman, Ibrahim Shkupolui, 43, a former Kosovo Albanian and long-term resident of Espoo in Finland.
Police believe he shot dead a former girlfriend, 42, who’d taken out a restraining order against him; went to a supermarket where she worked, and shot four other people, possibly out of jealousy over the woman’s relationships there; then went home and killed himself.
Finland has been tightening access to firearms since two cases of multiple shootings, at schools, in 2007 and 2008.
The country has a gun culture associated with hunting but authorities fear that access to hand guns, like the 9 mm pistol used this time, has more to do with the presence of outside criminal gangs operating across national frontiers.
Other theories focus on the incidence of mental illness among asylum seekers attempting to settle in, in Scandinavian countries, after escaping from traumatic situations in their home countries, notably Balkans states in the former Yugoslavia.
NEW THREAT TO DANISH MAN
In Denmark, fears of political violence have been invoked once more, by a break-in at the Aarhus home of Kurt Westergaard, 74, the cartoonist subjected to death threats after he published a satirical picture, four years ago, purporting to represent the prophet Mohammed.
Police said they shot and wounded a man aged 28 from Somalia, suspected of being linked to a terrorist organisation, who’d got into the building with an axe and a knife.
He’d attacked police, and two other men were involved in the break-in.
CHINA: JUDICIAL MURDER?
Yet another angle on bad deeds: talk of a judicial murder in China, in the case
of Akmal Shaikh, 53, a British citizen and father of three, executed on Tuesday (27.12.09).
He’d been charged with carrying drugs on a flight into South-western China, and Chinese authorities said due process was followed, in the context of the country’s “zero-tolerance†policy against illegal drug trafficking.
The executed man’s family say that he was mentally ill, and was tricked by criminals into carrying drugs he did not know about.
The Chinese courts did not entertain a clinical examination of the prisoner before putting him to death, despite a long campaign to put forward evidence on his condition, while he was being held.
The British government objected, commenting that the illicit drugs trade had claimed yet another victim.
Picture
Nine mm pistol, a scourge of the new century, (textually.org)