A Dutch court on Thursday acquitted 12 men accused of plotting a "holy war" against the West and helping to recruit al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the Netherlands. The Rotterdam district court said there was no evidence to convict the men on charges of membership of an unspecified criminal organization that provided support to al Qaeda and the Taliban in their fight against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. Prosecutors scaled down some of the charges against the group — four Algerians, a Frenchman, a Moroccan, a Libyan, an Iraqi, an Egyptian, a Turk, a Mauritanian and a Dutch citizen — during the course of the three-and-a-half week trial.
| This will come back to bite the Dutchies. My guess would be within a year... |
The men were arrested last year in raids across the Netherlands. Four of the men were released during the proceedings because the sentences they would have received if convicted would have been lower than the time they had already spent in custody.
The Dutch are on quite a roll.. |