Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein has been widely named as the gunman who killed two people and wounded five at a cultural centre and synagogue in the Danish capital.
El-Hussein was not an immigrant. He was of Palestinian descent but his parents settled in Denmark before he was born. Like the gunmen in Paris, he turned against the country of his birth.
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Classmates who spoke to the Ekstra Bladet newspaper (in Danish) remembered a loner with a hot temper who loved to discuss Islam and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He was not afraid to voice a hatred of Jews, said one.
So he was on the path to becoming a thoroughly terrible person, one with no inhibitions about wholesale hatred of groups of people.
But things took a much more serious turn in November 2013 when El-Hussein stabbed a 19-year-old man on a subway train. He evaded capture but was arrested by chance two months later in connection with a burglary,the Politiken newspaper reported (in Danish).
He escaped an attempted murder charge, convicted instead of grievous bodily harm and sentenced to two years in prison.
It was there, it seems, that El-Hussein lurched towards the radicalised youth that police suspect murdered two people on Saturday.
With “radicalized” in this context meaning someone who hates whole categories of people enough to kill specimens of the categories. That’s a very particular interpretation of the word “radical” – particular and not very accurate. I prefer “fascist” for that quality, myself.