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LAST UPDATE | 1 Sep 2018
TWO PEOPLE WHO were seriously injured in a knife attack at Amsterdam’s Central Station are US citizens, the US ambassador has said, as Dutch police probed a possible terror link.
“We are aware that both victims were US citizens and have been in touch with them and their families,” Pete Hoekstra said in a statement.
Panic broke out at the Dutch capital’s main station shortly after midday yesterday when the knife-wielding man stabbed two bystanders before he was shot and wounded by police.
Police later identified the suspect as a 19-year-old Afghan man with a German residency permit.
He is being questioned in hospital under police guard and Dutch authorities said they were in close contact with their German counterparts for more details about his background.
A preliminary investigation revealed that the assailant did not know his victims and that he did not specifically target them, the police spokesman said – suggesting a random attack.
An Amsterdam police spokesman, Frans Zuiderhoek, told AFP late yesterday “we are seriously taking into account that there was a terrorist motive”.
Another police spokesman, Rob van der Veen, said today that “the police investigation is in full swing and we are looking at all angles”.
Further details of the two Americans injured were not immediately known, although one was reported to be a young man.
Hoekstra said the US is ready to “assist as appropriate, with our main priority as always being the safety and well-being of US citizens in the country”.
The attack comes a day after an announcement by Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders that he was cancelling moves to stage a cartoon competition to caricature the Prophet Mohammad, a plan that had angered many Muslims.
Scenes of panic
Witnesses described scenes of panic yesterday as gunshots rang out and thousands of commuters and tourists were evacuated from the rail terminus shortly after midday.
“The two people are very badly injured, and they were brought to the hospital,” said Van der Veen. Police today said they are in a satisfactory condition.
One witness said he saw a young man “stumble” into his flower shop at the station with a bleeding wound to his hand.
“Shortly afterwards I heard some shots and I know something has gone badly wrong,” Richard Snelders told the ANP news agency. A while later he saw another man lying on the ground nearby, he said.
“The first thing that comes up in your mind is that it’s a terror attack. After all, you are at Amsterdam Central Station. There was a lot of panic,” Snelders said.
Police declined to comment when asked whether there was a possible link between Friday’s attack and the cartoon competition.
Wilders’ controversial announcement has seen angry protests, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Afghan Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid issued a statement, calling on Muslims to attack Dutch troops and calling Wilders’ plan “a hostile act by this country (the Netherlands) against all Muslims”.
Earlier this week, police arrested another man – believed to be Pakistani– at The Hague’s Central Station after he posted a film on Facebook saying he was planning to assassinate the blond-haired Wilders, well known for his virulent anti-Islamic views.
Wilders on Thursday said he was cancelling plans to stage the competition to “avoid the risk of making people victims of Islamist violence”.
‘Stay down’
Yesterday, police quickly arrived at the scene with video images showing police ordering the suspect in English to “stay down” after he had been shot.
Images posted on social media showed security guards ushering passengers towards exits and paramedics arriving at the scene with stretchers.
Two platforms at the station – located in the Dutch capital’s historic canal-ringed city centre – had been evacuated and closed off to passengers, police said, and were reopened for rail traffic two hours later.
A special police department opened a routine probe into why police shot the man.
The Netherlands has so far been spared from the slew of terror attacks which have rocked its closest European neighbours in the past few years.
But amid a number of scares and reports that people linked to some of those attacks may have crossed briefly into the country, top Dutch security and intelligence officials have stressed that the threat level is substantial.
Around 250,000 people travel through Central Station every day, according to statistics provided by the Amsterdam.info travel guide.
- © AFP 2018.
New headline, ‘terrible immigration policies leads to terrible problems’
@Dave O Keeffe:” immigration leads to terrible problems”
@Dave O Keeffe: probably didn’t get his way with a Dutch blonde so the usual response, take out a knife and start murder and mayhem, they are now a scourge in all of Europe’s night spots, they don’t take no for an answer.
@john bennett: eh your scenario isn’t terrorism at all though.
@Sayitlikeitis: sorry but that’s just a blanket statement with no basis in fact. Historically everything is immigration. The policy is the problem. Not the entire idea of immigration. It needs to be much, much stricter not entirely abolished. Most immigrants the world round are absolutely no trouble and contribute to their new community. I think that you’re forgetting that not all immigrants come from regions with prevalent fundamentalism.
@Sayitlikeitis: sustained bombing of other people’s countries just to satisfy the oil barons causes problems
@Peter De Courcy: K, so who have the Thais and Filipinos being bombing in a sustained manner that they’ve been faced with violent Islamic insurgencies for the past few years? Or while we’re at it, who have the Dutch been bombing that these attacks should be occurring on their streets?
@Sean Og O’Domhnaill: not at all. I think you’ve missed the mark entirely. Check the rest of my comments on the article.
@Sean Og O’Domhnaill: You can’t reason with the resident apologist halfwits on the threads here. Just block the apologist simpletons.
@Ronan Sexton: Maybe we do need another major war on this continent! Just so hate filled individuals like you lot realise that it’s actually not worth being so angry and hateful towards others!
@Dave O Keeffe: Dave, on average there are 11,500 Americans shot dead annually in the USA. So I’d prefer to take my chances with the immigrants.
How did a foreign terrorist make his way into the Nederlands ,?
@RJ.Fallon: terrorists legally can’t be treated as such until they carry out an attack.
@RJ.Fallon: The Schengen, if he held a German ID card he can travel unchecked on the many international train services. I once travelled from Amsterdam to Lille in France without a single passport check.
@Dave O Keeffe: Dave time and time again the journal has deleted any anti Islam comments….yet not one comment was deleted about abuse in the chruch. And the there where many many bad comments against the church
@Free Thinker ❌: i know , but I think most people here know what I was actually getting at.
@Sayitlikeitis: mine are getting deleted too. It’s very strange.
@RJ.Fallon: Open borders my man, open borders.
@Dave O Keeffe: Silly law.
@KerryBlueMike: well, not really. You’re not guilty of a crime until you’ve committed it.
@Dave O Keeffe: they called it internment in Ireland
@RJ.Fallon: What’s wrong with these people. they can’t take a joke.
@KerryBlueMike: Precisely.
@RJ.Fallon: He is one of Merkel’s shits
Comments deleted left right n centre,fook, the Journal really is a toothless entity,it’s no wonder Facebook and Twitter are the go-to sites
@John Burke: no John it’s perfectly ok to show hate for the chruch, that’s no issue at all, actually it’s trendy to label the pope a peado and not have comments deleted. But even mention and the fact there followers are murdering people there is out rage and comments get deleted.
@Sayitlikeitis: A few stabbings is nothing compared to the mass slaughter of children women and men in the Middle East by the Saudi’s U.S and their outpost Israel
@John Burke: watch my FACTUAL comment get deleted
@John Burke: so it OK to stab people in Holland so…. what absolute tripe
@John Burke: Amazing since the article is accompanied by #terrorism. It beggars belief
@Herbert: I get you, but in fairness he must have “brown skin” so you know yourself nudge nudge wink wink
@Mick Tope: Did I say that ? = NO what any person with an ounce of cop on reading that will deduce is that in the grand scheme of things, it pales in comparison, but of course every murder is terrible, it just happens in the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East
The Journal once again validates the opinion of everyone commenting here that they are activists, not journalists. No better than Vox of Huffpo
@Herbert: it’s a bit mad but then again, you do spout nonsense
@Dave O Keeffe: At least I’m not an apologist for Islamic terror Dave.
@Herbert: neither am I. Care to find me an example? I know source material is t your strong suit but give it a shot anyway.
Was he a doctor or an engineer? Poor fellow, probably radicalised… there are no Islamic terrorists, just poor radicalised innocent folk. Now if he was a good old atheist he would be a terrorist for sure.
@Mick Tope: or as Conor paddington would describe him a brother let down by the people of the West
i hope the families of the 2 victims sue the shit out of the German Bundes Agentur fuer Migration und Flucht (BAMF).
Merkel’s defining legacy
@Rear Admiral: they could start by sueing their own country.
@Steven Fitzpatrick: Why is there always a victim-blaming shit trying to justify terrorism?
Deleted posts that questioned why one religion can be lampooned on this website and comments section however others religions cannot be criticised or questioned pretty much at all. Mind boggling, the future is scary.
Ah the religion of peace.
@Dave O Keeffe: Islam. Putting the fun back into fundamentalism.
Just take him out and hang him!
Jesus is terrorisim still a thing? I thought it was just GDPR and gluten
@Mjhint: big surprise there
It’s saddening to see that as a nation who once endured prejudice because of a small minority who chose to carry out terrorist attacks, ( I can well recall the special treatment we used to get as Irish citizens entering or leaving the Uk, never mind how we were treated historically in both the US and the Uk for our religion), that we now choose to paint an entire group of people who happen to have the same religious persuasion as a small group of terrorists as one and the same. Bigotry and racism is no less appalling when carried out by people who once endured it. We often criticise Israel for their lack of empathy considering their past suffering but what I am reading here places us well into the realm of hypocrisy. It’s no dogs, no blacks and no muslims now.
@Ivan Connolly: They’re not a small group and that is not a valid comparison. Remember the time the IRA had such strong support that they managed to annex Northern Iraq and Syria and establish their own state in the face of multinational, military opposition? No, but I bet you can think of a group that did.
@Sean Og O’Domhnaill: there are over a billion muslims. It’s a small amount who are radicalised. The bigger question your statement poses is who created the void that allowed radicals to take control of the area you mentioned. Perhaps if the Uk had bombed the Dublin government into oblivion the IRA might have had the opportunity to make their own country. The continuous destruction of a large part of the Islamic world by the west has been the single biggest driver of Islamic extremism. You reap what you sow and now you complain you don’t like the results. The past and current actions of the west and in particular one or two countries are directly responsible for the relatively small spate of terrorism that is occurring now.
@Ivan Connolly: in relative terms there is far less terrorism in Europe today than there was just 40 yeas ago. And that was homegrown European terrorism. We are now subject to the same 24 hour news cycles in addition to social media that has turned Americans into the most unnecessarily frightened people in the world. Your spurious diatribes are a glaring example of that mass paranoia. Buckle up because you are going to die in a car crash before any Muslim gets you.
@Ivan Connolly: so far you have compared ISIS to the IRA, stated that Islamic attacks in modern day Europe are purely due to the West bombing the Middle East. To wrap up you are comparing being killed by an Islamic attack as being less chance than being killed in a car accident and therefore we are all effectively getting into lather about nothing. That is an interesting logic.
@Ivan Connolly: How small do you think the numbers are, and what are you basing your estimations on? The below video using stats from Pew that found the numbers of Muslims who hold what we would regard as radical beliefs to not be a small proportion at all, but in fact an extremely large number of Muslims, hundreds of millions in fact, who hold these beliefs. And that’s why the radicals were able to take over, because they have huge support among the Muslim population. And while homegrown red brigades were a problem 40 years ago they were, as you say, homegrown. The beauty of external threats is you can just not let them in, and any that are here can just be sent en masse back from whence they came to continue building all those wonderful societies, mud huts and all, that Islamic societies are so conducive to creating.
@Neville Bartos: think the only comparison I made was between the bigotry and racism we endured and that of muslims today but twist it as required to meet your needs.
@Sean Og O’Domhnaill: radical beliefs do not make you a terrorist and interpreting what is radical is entirely subjective. I consider what you are saying as radical but I’m pretty sure you aren’t a terrorist. However reading the end of you comment I am pretty sure you are a racist bigot. The Islamic world was a beacon of learning whilst we were living in mud huts. But as with all people ignorant of history and the world around them you can continue to create a narrative that suits your vitriol.
@Ivan Connolly: so what has this beacon of learning contributed to human advancement in say the last 500 years? And sorry, I’ve shown you that hundreds of millions of Muslims believe suicide attacks against innocent infidels can be justified, but your response is that this isn’t a problem so long as they don’t carry out such attacks themselves, because simply holding the belief that I deserve to be indiscriminately slaughtered for not sharing their beliefs isn’t terrorism in and of itself? How about the hundreds of millions that think women are the property of their husbands and should thus not disobey him, that’s grand too so long as they don’t commit acts of terrorism themselves, that’s your position?
It’s cute how when your ill-informed, poorly reasoned apologist nonsense is exposed for the hard of thinking rubbish that it really is you automatically jump to the “muh, racist bigot” defence. You people are so hilariously predictable, completely incapable of forming independent thoughts and so shout your little pre-programmed mantras to protect philosophical beliefs from uncomfortable reality. Like kids do. But you’re not a kid, which is sad.
@Sean Og O’Domhnaill: you regurgitate the views of a Zionist extremist who proposed the final solution to the Palestinian problem was to throw the Palestinians out of Palestine as an objective analysis of Islamic extremism and tell me I am unable to create thoughts of my own. Putting up a link to someone else’s thoughts as an example of your own well informed thought process seems like irony to me but apparently has escaped your refined mind.
@Ivan Connolly: and just as a little addendum, don’t delude yourself into thinking we are so evolved. It wasn’t that long ago that rape in marriage wasn’t even a crime, homosexuality was and gay bashing is still a sport. I’m not even going to elaborate on all the crimes against out of wedlock mothers and children but you go on coming up with other people’s thoughts.
@Ivan Connolly: The stats are what I’m referencing, and the stats come from Pew. You’re attacking the source, because you don’t like the conclusions. It doesn’t matter that the stats are true, you disagree with them philosophically, so will ignore them entirely and instead attack the source presenting the facts you wish were untrue. Do you recognise that that’s what you’re doing?
They throw gays off roofs in many Muslim countries. They chop people’s hands off for theft, they stone married rape victims to death for adultery, they practice sex slavery and paedophilia is rampant throughout many of their societies. Been a while since we were up to those sort of things wouldn’t you agree?
@Sean Og O’Domhnaill: https://media.giphy.com/media/b9aScKLxdv0Y0/giphy.gif
Angela Merkel’s idiotic decision claims 2 more victims!
@Alan Carmody: smile and stop the hate
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