emphasis mine. As much as Iceland seems like a lovely place, I'm sure officers there have killed people in the line of duty before and it's more just the "armed police operation" that represents the difference.
I'm from Denmark, which is culturally fairly close to Iceland and we still talk about the riot in 1993 where the police fired 111 shots in the most violent encounter with rioters since the second world war (noone was killed or seriously injured). We're a country of 5 million and we have less than one person a year that gets shot to death by the police. In Norway they're right now discussing whether the police should even be allowed to carry weapons.
If you're American I can understand your disbelief, since it's an extremely violent country, but as a scandinavian it seems quite believable.
And I just meant that I would assume that, unless the article further elaborates on this "first", at some point in the entire history of the country of Iceland, somebody had died at the hands of law-enforcement. Even at a rate of once per decade.
[1] http://www.politi.dk/NR/rdonlyres/20DE43AF-33F4-48C5-A710-6A...
I assume you could argue that this does not include police killing people by beating them or running them over with their cars, but I'd say we're safe.
[1] http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_i...
Seriously, I've encountered these kind of denialist reactions all over the place, and it so pisses me off.
It's not normal for cops to shoot at people in any civilized country ("not normal" as in "national news if it happens"), and for a country the size and nature of Iceland it's perfectly plausible (not to mention simply true) that this is the first time someone was killed by the police.
The ultra-violent American way of policing is the aberration here, not Iceland.
It will take more than one ambiguously-qualified offhand sentence in an article to convince me of otherwise.