COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — 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.
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.
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 trial is scheduled to end Wednesday. It was not immediately clean when the verdict will be announced.