On the afternoon of June 25, 2003, gunfire erupted on Sennepshaven, a quiet residential street in Herlev, a suburb northwest of Copenhagen. Two Swedish men—aged 21 and 23—were shot multiple times by attackers wielding automatic weapons. Fourteen shots rang out in broad daylight, recorded on video by nearby witnesses. A third man in the vehicle managed to escape. The two victims were killed instantly.
What made this murder significant was not just its brutality, but what it revealed: the warfare between Swedish organized crime groups had begun spilling across Scandinavian borders into Denmark.
## The Cross-Border Gang Conflict
The shooting was no random act of violence. It was part of an escalating conflict between two rival Swedish gangs—Dødspatruljen ("The Death Patrol") and Shottaz—groups based in the Stockholm suburbs, particularly Rinkeby. For reasons that remain partly unclear in publicly available records, this internal Swedish gang dispute had moved its operations into Danish territory.
For international observers, the case illustrates a broader phenomenon in Northern Europe: the porousness of Scandinavian borders for organized crime. Unlike Western European countries with longer histories of gang-related violence and established law enforcement responses, Nordic nations in the early 2000s were still developing institutional frameworks to handle transnational gang activity.
Denmark, in particular, found itself hosting a proxy conflict between Swedish criminal organizations—a reality that would force its justice system to respond decisively.
## Evidence and Investigation
The video footage captured by witnesses proved crucial. Danish police, combined with Swedish law enforcement, identified five men responsible for the shooting: Mohamed Abdighani Ali (22), Mansor Abdi Ismail (20), Benjamin Owusu Afriyie (25), and two additional defendants who were only 17 at the time of the crime.
DNA evidence and the eyewitness video formed the backbone of the prosecution's case. By August 2020—more than 16 years after the shooting—all five men had been convicted by Glostrup Court (Retten i Glostrup), Denmark's regional court for the greater Copenhagen area.
## Historic Sentencing
