HILLEROED, Denmark -- A 40-year-old pyromanic was committed to mental care for life Wednesday for starting a 1973 hotel fire in Copenhagen that killed 35 people, including 20 Americans.
Erik Solbakke Hansen pleaded guilty to all charges involved in the Hotel Hafnia fire, as well as other charges that included the 1980 murder of a 15-year-old girl.
Solbakke Hansen was arrested in March 1987 by police in Hilleroed, 20 miles north of the capital, following a spate of arson attacks that destroyed four homes and a factory.
While being questioned about the fires, he told authorities he was responsible for the Hotel Hafnia fire in Copenhagen 14 years earlier.
The fire -- the worst hotel disaster in Denmark's history -- rapidly engulfed the building and trapped dozens of guests in their rooms.
Among the dead were 20 Americans, four Austrians, two Italians, two Brazilians, one Irish, one Canadian, one Dutch and four Danes.
At first police did not believe Solbakke Hansen's confession about the hotel fire and the killing of a girl who had been sunbathing on a west Denmark beach.
'But eventually his detailed description of both crimes was so convincing that it became obvious to us that this was our man,' the Hillerod police spokeswoman said.
A Hillerod Municipal Court judge ordered Solbakke Hansen, who was diagnosed as a pyromaniac, to spend the rest of his life in a institution for the criminally insane. He was not expected to appeal the sentence.
