Spionkrigen i Ringsted

What Is the Series About?

Spionkrigen i Ringsted — translated roughly as The Spy War in Ringsted — is a DRTV documentary series that follows one of the most extraordinary espionage and assassination-plot cases in modern Danish history. Premiering in February 2022 on DR's streaming platform, the series traces how a quiet Danish provincial town became the epicentre of a transnational intelligence operation linked to the bitter proxy rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. DR's own description of the series frames it as a spiondrama built around a single family from Ringsted, whose life was upended by assassination preparation, torture, a street killing, terror, flight, and espionage.

The series covers events stretching from a dramatic nationwide police manhunt in September 2018 through multiple court convictions that concluded as recently as March 2022, giving viewers a rare real-time window into how a foreign intelligence operation unfolds — and collapses — on European soil.

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The Case

The Manhunt — 28 September 2018

On 28 September 2018, Danish police launched a large-scale manhunt after intelligence services concluded that an Iranian operative had entered Denmark with the specific purpose of assassinating a senior member of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), an Iranian separatist organisation, who was living in Ringsted. The operation was dramatic enough to generate nationwide attention; at one point, authorities pursued a black Volvo they believed might be connected to the suspected assassin — a detail that TV2's court coverage later highlighted as illustrative of the chaotic, real-time nature of the intervention.

The intended target was identified in court proceedings as the leader of the ASMLA's Danish cell. ASMLA, which advocates for the rights of Arab Ahvazi people in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, has long been considered a hostile entity by the Iranian government. The organisation was also linked to attacks on a military parade in Ahvaz, Iran, in September 2018 — events that give additional context to the urgency of the alleged Iranian operation against its members abroad.

The Primary Defendant: Mohammad Davoudzadeh LoLoei

The central figure prosecuted in the first phase of the case was Mohammad Davoudzadeh LoLoei, a 40-year-old man who, before his arrest, served as board chairman of the Norwegian-Iranian Friendship Association — a civilian cultural organisation that gave him a veneer of respectability across Scandinavian Iranian communities. Prosecutors argued that this cover was precisely the point.

In June 2020, Retten i Roskilde found him guilty of spying on behalf of an Iranian intelligence service and of participating in the planning of a murder on Danish soil. The court sentenced him to 7 years' imprisonment and permanent expulsion from Denmark. LoLoei immediately announced an appeal, seeking full acquittal — a legal challenge whose outcome is not fully resolved in the available documentation at the time of the series' release.

A Network, Not Just One Man

What began as a single assassination-plot investigation rapidly expanded in scope. According to DR's own series description, three men connected to the Ringsted case were subsequently accused of conducting surveillance on more than 100 people in Denmark and across other Nordic and Western European countries. This surveillance operation is alleged to have served not only Iranian intelligence interests but, in a striking twist, also the interests of Saudi Arabia — Iran's principal regional rival.

A later conviction in March 2022, referenced by Zetland's investigative coverage, saw a related defendant sentenced to 8 years' imprisonment and expulsion from Denmark for supporting terror attacks inside Iran and for espionage on behalf of Saudi Arabia. Whether this represents a separate individual or a second conviction phase involving a previously charged defendant has not been made fully explicit in the publicly available court records cited here, and readers should treat the two sentencing figures as potentially referring to distinct defendants within the broader Ringsted network until the full trial record is verified.

The Geopolitical Backdrop

The case sits at the intersection of two of the Middle East's most entrenched state conflicts. Iran has for years sought to neutralise ASMLA activists abroad, viewing them as a security threat to the Khuzestan region. Saudi Arabia, in turn, has strategic incentives to support or monitor groups that destabilise its Iranian rival. That both states' intelligence interests appear to have converged — or competed — inside a small Danish city of roughly 35,000 people is, as Zetland noted in its analysis, an utrolig historie (incredible story) that few Danes were aware of until police sirens broke the silence in September 2018.

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Production

The series was produced by DR Dokumentar and released on DRTV in early 2022. The director has not been publicly identified in the sources available at the time of writing. The series appears to have benefited from access to court documents, news footage from the 2018 manhunt, and likely interviews with individuals close to the case, given DR's institutional resources and track record in documentary journalism. The release date of approximately 1 February 2022 coincided with the closing phase of the broader legal proceedings, giving the series unusual narrative completeness.

The format — a multi-episode documentary series rather than a single feature — allowed the production team to map the full chronological arc: from the initial assassination threat, through LoLoei's 2020 conviction, to the 2022 sentencing that closed out the documented legal proceedings. DR has not publicly stated the total episode count in the sources reviewed here.

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Reception

The series generated significant attention in Danish media and among audiences interested in geopolitical crime. Zetland, one of Denmark's leading long-form digital news outlets, published both a major explainer piece and a follow-up analysis of the case, collectively framing the Ringsted story as a landmark moment in Danish awareness of foreign-state interference on home soil. The outlet's framing — emphasising that Iranian men were convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia inside Denmark — was considered the case's most counterintuitive and politically explosive detail.

No verified IMDb rating or audience score is available in the sources reviewed for this article. The series does not appear to have attracted formal controversy in terms of editorial complaints or legal challenges, though the politically sensitive nature of the allegations — touching on two sovereign states' intelligence activities — inevitably invites scrutiny of sourcing and framing. An episode of the broader DR documentary strand linked to the Ringsted case, titled Skyggekrigen: Kampen om sandheden (The Shadow War: The Battle for Truth), suggests DR continued developing related documentary content beyond the initial series.

Swedish public broadcaster SVT also covered the wider Scandinavian dimensions of the spy network, reporting on unique images of a suspected spy photographed in a Södertälje shopping centre, indicating that the network's activities extended well beyond Danish borders.

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The Case Today

As of the series' release in early 2022, the legal proceedings were largely — though not entirely — concluded. The March 2022 conviction for the second major defendant marked the formal end of the principal criminal trial phases. Mohammad Davoudzadeh LoLoei's appeal, filed immediately after his 2020 conviction, adds an unresolved legal thread; the outcome of that appeal was not confirmed in the sources available here.

The broader implications of the case continue to resonate in Scandinavian security policy discussions. Sweden's SÄPO (Security Police) took note of the case, with a former security police official commenting publicly on the unique nature of the espionage trial from a Swedish intelligence perspective. The Ringsted case is now frequently cited in Nordic counter-intelligence literature as an example of how Middle Eastern state rivalries export violence and surveillance into European civilian life — using cultural associations, diaspora communities, and everyday cover identities as operational infrastructure.

For ASMLA, the exposure of the assassination plot provided grim validation of the organisation's longstanding claims that its members face lethal threats from the Iranian state — claims that European governments had not always taken at face value prior to September 2018.