Two white suspects have far-right ties. The prosecutor in the case called it “a personal relationship that has gone wrong.”
A young Black man was tortured and killed on a remote island in Denmark by two white men with known far-right affiliations, one of them with a swastika tattoo on his leg, but the authorities are refusing to call it a hate crime.
Noting that the victim, Phillip Mbuji Johansen, and his attackers knew one another, the prosecutor, Benthe Pedersen Lund, told a local newspaper that the killing had nothing to do with “skin color” but with “a personal relationship that has gone wrong.”
Denmark adopted a
hate crimes statute in 2004, but activists, friends and family members, citing the grisly circumstances of the killing, say the authorities are often too reluctant to acknowledge racially inspired violence.
“It took three days for the police inspector and state prosecutor to completely refute that it is racially motivated, despite all the evidence pointing toward it,” said Awa Konaté, a Danish-Ivorian activist who teaches African
cultural awareness. “This shows this is a systemic issue.”
Mr. Johansen (he sometimes identified as Mbuji Johansen), a 28-year-old engineering student of Danish and Tanzanian descent, came to the island of Bornholm to visit his mother last week. He went to a party on Monday and was later invited for a beer in the woods, his mother told the local Ekstra Bladet newspaper.
The next morning, Mr. Johansen’s mutilated body was found at a camp site. According to the preliminary indictment, his skull was broken after he was beaten several times with a wooden beam; he was stabbed multiple times; a knife was driven through his throat and a knee had been planted in his neck. He died sometime early Tuesday, according to a forensic report.
Two local men — brothers, aged 23 and 25 — were arrested on Wednesday on manslaughter charges. The police say the men have
admitted to beating Mr. Johansen, but deny killing him. Mr. Johansen’s mother, who asked to remain anonymous, told local news outlets that one of the two suspects was an old friend of her son.
The suspects have not yet been identified publicly. One of them has a swastika and the words “white power” tattooed on his leg. The other suspect has
expressed support for a Danish extreme right party, called Stram Kurs, or “Hard Line,” and recently posted a message of support for White Lives Matter on his Facebook page, according to Redox, a left-activist research group.
Denmark, a Nordic nation that prides itself on its progressive attitudes, has suffered an upsurge in racial violence recently. Between 2007 and 2016, racially motivated hate crimes in Denmark more than quadrupled, the European Union said in a 2018
report.
In response to the global protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, right-wing extremists of the Nordic Resistance Movement, an underground group, have
put up White Lives Matter posters in at least two cities in Denmark.
Some Danish news outlets have noted that a knee was pressed hard against Mr. Johansen’s neck, just as in the killing of Mr. Floyd, as well as the hard-right affiliation of both suspects. The story has nevertheless mostly been treated as a “homicide” and has received only modest news coverage.