Trial starts for a Polish man accused of punching Danish prime minister in Copenhagen

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — The trial of a Polish man accused of punching Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in the shoulder in June began Tuesday, with Frederiksen not expected to appear in court.

She suffered a minor whiplash injury when a man assaulted her in central Copenhagen on June 7 and canceled her schedule for the next few days.

The Ekstra Bladet newspaper said the unidentified 39-year-old Polish man is charged with punching Frederiksen's right shoulder with a clenched fist, causing her to lose her balance, but not fall.

Defense lawyer Henrik Karl Nielsen told Copenhagen District Court that his client pleaded not guilty, it said.

The Polish man, who has been living in Denmark for five years, told the court that he was ''intoxicated by alcohol but not drunk'' and was just wandering around when he saw Frederiksen, Danish public broadcaster DR reported.

A police officer assigned to Frederiksen's protection told the court that she had stopped to talk on the phone when the man walked up to her and hit her after saying something incomprehensible.

''In the situation, it seemed he was angry,'' the bodyguard, identified only by his police number KF081, told the court, according to DR.

Frederiksen was taking a break from campaigning for her Social Democratic Party in European Parliament elections when the assault occurred at a busy downtown Copenhagen plaza. The attack was not linked to the campaign event.

The man, who has been held in pretrial custody since the assault, also faces other charges including sexual harassment by exposing himself to passing people and groping a woman at a commuter train station, and fraud involving deposit-marked bottles and cans at two supermarkets. He has confessed to those charges.

Prosecutors said the suspect has 22 previous convictions for petty crimes, mainly shoplifting, DR reported.

He told the court that his parents live in Denmark and his wife and daughter are in Poland.

Frederiksen, 46, is the leader of the Social Democratic Party and has been Denmark's prime minister since 2019. She led the country through the global COVID-19 pandemic and a controversial 2020 decision to wipe out Denmark's entire captive mink population to minimize the risk of the mammals spreading the virus.

The assault came as violence against politicians spread in the runup to the EU elections. In May, a candidate from Germany's center-left Social Democrats was beaten and seriously injured while campaigning.

In Slovakia, the campaign was overshadowed by an attempt to assassinate populist Prime Minister Robert Fico on May 15, sending shockwaves through the nation and reverberating throughout Europe. Fico was shot in the abdomen and seriously wounded. The suspect was immediately arrested and faces terror charges.

Assaults on politicians in Denmark are rare.