Blekingegade

Facts

Denmark's biggest terrorism case

By Hanne Fabricius, Cand.phil. arkæolog, ph.d.-stipendiat (13 stories)

No. 2 Blekingegade on the island of Amager was the setting for Denmark's biggest terrorism case. In the 1960s and 70s, the communists Gotfred Appel and Ulla Hauton gained a following of young, rebellious individuals who regarded the charismatic Appel as their political ideologist. They were dispatched to military training camps in Jordan run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In the 1970s and 80s, in an operation they coded as The Apples", the movement now known as the "Blekingegade Gang" supported the PFLP with arms and the proceeds of a series of unsolved robberies. The Post Office heist in the central pedestrian precinct of Copenhagen's Købmagergade in 1988, where the gang shot a junior police officer, spelled the end of the Blekingegade Gang. The members of the gang later received prison sentences of 1-10 years. "

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The fall of an apple

Story written by Hanne Fabricius

Time / Periode 1970 1989

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Firefighter Holger Jensen was one of the apples", and Gotfred Appel's right-hand man. Until 1980, Jensen fronted the gang's criminal and international activities. On Monday, 15 September 1980, he was waiting in a parked VW camper van in front of a hypermarket outside Aarhus when a lorry crashed into the van, killing Holger Jensen on the spot. Nine years later, police investigations revealed why Holger Jensen was waiting outside the hypermarket on that very Monday. From the van, Jensen was watching the collection of the hypermarket's million-kroner weekend turnover. That is, until a lorry ploughed into him. "