A gunman raked a Copenhagen cafe with dozens of bullets Saturday during a free-speech forum, killing a 40-year-old man and injuring three police officers in an attack that survivors said appeared to have been an attempt to mimic last month’s massacre at a satirical newspaper in Paris.

Hours later there was a second gun attack near a synagogue but it was unclear whether it was linked to the café shootings.

The French ambassador to Denmark and Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks— previously targeted for caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad in 2007 — were among those taking part in the café debate who survived the torrent of gunfire.

“It was the same intention as Charlie Hebdo, except they didn’t manage to get in,” French Ambassador François Zimeray told Agence France-Presse, referring to the Jan. 7 attack in Paris. “Intuitively I would say there were at least 50 gunshots, and the police here are saying 200. Bullets went through the doors, and everyone threw themselves to the floor.”

Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt called the incident a “terrorist attack” that filled her “with deep anger” and put the country on high alert Saturday evening.

Late into the night, police were hunting for a lone gunman who fled in a getaway car and who was described as a male in his late 20s wielding an assault rifle. A photo released by Danish authorities shows him wearing a dark-blue ski jacket with a red woollen cap and a matching scarf covering the lower portion of his face.

Police in Sweden, separated from Copenhagen by an eight-kilometre bridge, also joined the search.

Later on Saturday, police said that three people, including two police officers, were wounded in a shooting near a synagogue in downtown Copenhagen, according to The Associated Press. The assailant in that attack fled on foot.

The attack was likely to add to already deep apprehensions over terrorism that are being felt across Europe as the continent contends with rising radicalism and a flood of homegrown fighters travelling to and from the battlefields of the Middle East.

The target of Saturday’s earlier attack was a north Copenhagen cafe, the Krudttonden, that is well-known for its jazz performances. On Saturday afternoon it was hosting a community discussion titled “Art, Blasphemy and the Freedom of Expression.”

Among the organizers was Vilks, who has received death threats since he drew the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog in 2007. An Al Qaeda faction placed a bounty on his head, and an American woman calling herself “Jihad Jane” was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting to kill him.

In recent years, Vilks, 68, has had constant police protection. On Saturday, he had security guards with him at the cafe and was unharmed in the hail of bullets, which left dozens of jagged holes in the cafe’s plate-glass windows.

Police did not immediately release the identity of the man who was killed, who was said to be a civilian.

Last month’s attack on Charlie Hebdo, in which editors and cartoonists were among 12 people killed, was believed to have been motivated by the magazine’s depictions of Muhammad. Twenty people in all were killed over three days of violence in Paris, including three assailants, all of whom grew up in France.

Police said the assailant in the Copenhagen cafe attack spoke Danish. He unleashed his fusillade of gunfire in the middle of the afternoon, with dozens of people gathered to hear Vilks, Zimeray and others discuss the limits of free expression in the age of terrorism.

Inna Shevchenko, an activist with the feminist group Femen, said she was in the middle of a speech, telling the audience that “often it is an illusion that we have freedom of speech in Europe,” according to tweets she later sent.

“Then we heard shots.”

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In audio of the moment the gunman struck that was posted online by the BBC, a woman can be heard speaking before she is interrupted by a volley of fire.

Survivors said that police who had been standing guard outside the cafe returned fire. The three injured officers were apparently among those who had been standing guard.