The Blekinge Street Gang

A young officer on Købmagergade

Shortly after 5 a.m. on 3 November 1988, armed robbers struck the main post office on Købmagergade in central Copenhagen. They posed as plain-clothes detectives, and the raid was over within minutes. As they escaped, a shotgun was fired at responding police, and a pellet struck Jesper Egtved Hansen, a 22-year-old police trainee. He died in hospital later that day. He is the only person known to have been killed in the long series of crimes linked to the group the Danish press came to call the Blekingegade Gang.

Estimates of the haul vary: Lex puts it at about 10 million kroner, while Faktalink and the Police Museum's history in Dansk Politi give about 13 million kroner, a figure that includes securities as well as cash.

Who the gang were

The members came from a small, tightly disciplined communist circle in Copenhagen whose thinking held that workers in wealthy countries shared in the exploitation of the developing world. They concluded that the most useful contribution they could make was to send money and equipment to liberation movements abroad. According to the court case and later research, the main beneficiary was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). TV 2 Kosmopol reports that a plan to kidnap Jörn Rausing of the Swedish packaging family for a large ransom was abandoned at a late stage.

Police and historians link the group to further robberies of post offices, cash transports and a Copenhagen department store over almost two decades. Several of these were never proved in court, and the members were acquitted of two of the older robberies, so they should be treated as attributions rather than established crimes.

A breakthrough by accident

In April 1989 police arrested Niels Jørgensen, Jan Weimann, Torkil Lauesen and Peter Døllner, but had little evidence and struggled to keep them in custody. On 2 May 1989, the day before a detention order was due to expire, Carsten Nielsen, who was still at large, crashed his car on Kongevejen between Holte and Birkerød north of Copenhagen. (One Dansk Politi article gives the date as 20 May, but other accounts agree on 2 May.) In the car police found foreign currency, disguises, false identity papers and a telephone bill for a flat at Blekingegade 2 on Amager. Behind a hidden door in that flat was an arsenal including rocket launchers, submachine guns, hand grenades and mines, together with forged documents and detailed robbery and kidnapping plans. A PET officer later said there would have been no case without the crash. The street gave the gang its name.

The trial and the verdicts

The trial opened at the Eastern High Court in September 1990, with a jury, and verdicts were given at the end of April or start of May 1991 (sources give 30 April and 2 May). The prosecution did not include a charge under the terrorism provision of the criminal code, section 114; a defence lawyer has argued that it then covered only terrorism on Danish soil. All the main defendants were convicted of taking part in the Købmagergade robbery, but nobody was convicted of killing the officer: the members did not reveal who had fired, and prosecutors could not prove intent to kill.

According to Dansk Politi and Faktalink, Jørgensen, Lauesen and Jan Weimann each received ten years, then the maximum for robbery, and Carsten Nielsen eight. Bo Weimann was given seven years for planning crimes, including the Købmagergade raid, and for compiling a list of Jewish businesses and individuals; Karsten Møller Hansen received three years and Døllner one. Lex's shorter summary, which says five men each received ten years, differs from these detailed accounts. The Supreme Court later upheld the verdicts, and the longest-serving members were released in late 1995.

A sixth participant, the Swiss national Marc Rudin, was arrested by Turkish police on 14 October 1991 while trying to cross the border on a false passport. He was handed over to Denmark in 1993, sentenced in October 1993 to eight years for complicity in the robbery, and expelled to Switzerland in 1997. Dansk Politi reports that he died in April 2023.

Questions about the intelligence service

The case left a long-running suspicion that the Security and Intelligence Service (PET) had known more about the group than it shared with the ordinary police. In 2010 the government set up the Blekingegade Commission, which began work that October and heard 65 witnesses. Its report on 26 May 2014 found no grounds to criticise PET or the Ministry of Justice and concluded that PET had passed relevant information to the police. Critics, including the author Peter Øvig Knudsen, noted that some material had been destroyed and some witnesses could not remember key events.

Why the case still matters

The murder acquittals remain a reference point in Danish criminal law for the difficulty of holding a group liable for a killing when no individual can be identified as the shooter. Øvig Knudsen's two-volume book (2007), a 2009 drama-documentary and a 2009 TV series kept the case in public view. In July 2025 the news site Frihedsbrevet published secret recordings of Torkil Lauesen, then 73, addressing about 100 left-wing activists in Amsterdam, in which he called the punishment mild and mocked the prosecutor. Nobody has ever been convicted of killing Jesper Egtved Hansen.