Kerstin Bree Carlson joins JiC for this guest-post on the remarkable story of Ahmed Samsam, who was convicted on terrorism charges in Spain, only to win his case after proving he was a Danish state agent. Kerstin’s current research examines terrorism trials in Denmark, France and Colombia.

At a time when government overreach is threatening established liberal, democratic traditions the world over, a curious and important legal development quietly took place in Denmark. Ahmed Samsam, wrongly convicted as a jihadi terrorist in Spain in 2018, forced the Danish government to publicly recognize that he was a Danish agent.

On 2 September 2025, Samsam won his case before the Danish Supreme Court, which found that he was a Danish undercover agent, not a jihadi terrorist, and ordered the government intelligence communities to recognize him as such. Within the hour, the intelligence services who for years had refused to “confirm or deny” knowledge of Samsam claimed him as their own. They are now working with him to clear his conviction in Spain. 

Samsam’s case has many of the trappings of a best-selling conspiracy/thriller novel. It is well known in Denmark but not beyond the country’s borders. The case is notable for the ways that it reveals flaws in Denmark’s human rights protections in cases that involve the state’s own misdeeds. It is also an opportunity to revisit serious legal flaws in cases related to foreign fighters in justice systems across Europe.

A Murder of Justice

The Danish language has a word that describes a miscarriage of justice resulting in the deliberate scapegoating of an innocent person for a crime they did not commit: justitsmord, literally “the murder of justice.” Think: Shawshank Redemption. Samsam is the modern poster child for justitsmord. 

In 2012 Ahmed Samsam, the Danish son of Syrian immigrants, left Denmark for Syria to fight against the repressive Assad regime. As part of a cohort of like-minded first-generation Danes, he was featured in a documentary that aired on Sunday afternoon television. Following his television debut, he was contacted by officers in Denmark’s intelligence services PET and FE (tasked with external and internal intelligence, respectively) and became, effectively, an agent for Denmark. He traveled to Syria with materials provided by Danish authorities and was paid; in exchange, he reported back on Danes he met as a foreign fighter, as well as the activities of the myriad jihadi resistance groups operating in Syria at the time. This relationship carried on until his handlers asked him to infiltrate the Islamic State (IS). “Those guys are crazy,” Samsam is reputed to have answered, refusing the assignment and ceasing his travels to Syria sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.

Fast forward to 2017 where Samsam, on vacation in Spain, was picked up by police. His compatriots were released but he was held, based on suspicious photos on his telephone featuring him holding military weapons in a Syrian landscape. Suspected of jihadi foreign fighting for groups on the terror list, Samsam informed the Spanish authorities that he was working for Denmark. Spanish authorities called their Danish counterparts: they were met by crickets. In 2018 Samsam went on trial for terrorism offences in Spain and, after a trial mired in legal and procedural errors, was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison.

In 2020, Samsam was transferred to a high-security Danish prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. There, two individuals giving only their first names visited him in prison and gave him the equivalent of 1500 euros in cash, the same payment he had previously received for his work as an informant. Cash is not permitted in Danish jails and Samsam reported the payment to prison officials. The story finally broke in the Danish press, pursued independently by two different outfits reaching the same conclusion: Samsam was a Danish asset who had been abandoned by the state he served and wrongly convicted.

Samsam’s day in court

From jail, Samsam brought a case against the government, requiring it to recognize him so that he could clear his name in Spain. In 2023, the case was heard by the Eastern Appeals Court in Copenhagen. The case revealed pressures exerted by the state against the press corps, as editors testified about how PET and FE representatives had threatened them with jail under the state secrets act if they did not reveal their reporters’ sources. The Samsam case is also wrapped up in Denmark’s scandalous surveillance and prosecution of the head of FE, Lars Findsen; Samsam’s identity as an agent is reputedly one of the secrets Findsen allegedly leaked.

The court ultimately ruled for the government, swayed by the necessity of state security as well as the impossibility of predicting whether a different outcome would have occurred before the Spanish court. This is the decision that Denmark’s Supreme Court overruled on 2 September. 

Beyond the extraordinary headlines and shocking revelations, the Samsam story offers two important take-aways. The first concerns how to constrain government. Denmark has long adhered to a representative democracy model, which imagines that misdeeds are punished by the voting electorate. Denmark does not have a constitutional court, and courts are not imagined as spaces where citizens challenge state action. This tradition may be changing, however. Earlier this year, a consortium of NGOs and private parties challenged the state’s program selling weapons to Israel. Denied by the Eastern Appeals Court, that case will be heard by the Supreme Court next spring. 

The second concerns the terror law jurisprudence that sentences (mostly) young Muslim men to jail and/or citizenship revocation. These cases defy the restorative justice principles that otherwise shape European criminal justice. Samsam’s win before the Danish Supreme Court offers the possibility to revisit the miscarriages of justice in Spain that permitted an individual who never worked for IS to be sentenced as one of Europe’s “most dangerous” foreign fighters. This in turn could open a broader conversation regarding how terror law jurisprudence has been built, and upon whom. 

In our current moment, we frequently witness courts captured by political pressures, from European courts denying the human rights of migrants to the U.S. Supreme Court unable to constrain the executive branch. The Danish example showcases the possibilities for courts, aided by a rigorous free press, to challenge political domination and balance power with pre-agreed principles (i.e. respect the rule of law).