A Danish court on Thursday sentenced a 31-year-old Swede to a two-month suspended prison for making a joke about a bomb at Copenhagen’s airport this summer.
It was gathered that in late July, Pontus Wiklund, a handball coach who was accompanying his team to an international competition, said when asked by an airport agent that a bag of balls he was checking in contained a bomb.
“We think you must have realised that it is more than likely that if you say the word ‘bomb’ in response to what you have in your bag, it will be perceived as a threat,” the judge told Wiklund, according to broadcaster TV2, which was present at the hearing.
The airport terminal was temporarily evacuated, and the coach arrested. He later apologised on his club’s website.
“I completely lost my judgement for a short time and made a joke about something you really shouldn’t joke about, especially in that place,” he said in a statement.
The public prosecutor said the fact that Wiklund was joking, as his lawyer noted, did not constitute a mitigating circumstance.
“This is not something we regard with humour in the Danish legal system,” prosecutor Christian Brynning Petersen told the court.
