| Submit your comments on this article |
| Europe |
| Dutch Soldiers Lay Siege to House After Officers Hurt (Update1) |
| 2004-11-10 |
| Dutch military special forces laid siege to a house in The Hague after three police officers were injured in a hand-grenade blast during an anti-terrorist raid. Authorities closed the airspace over the city to civilian flights. Police evacuated the Laakkwartier neighborhood following the raid, at 2:45 a.m. local time today. The grenade was thrown from the house. Suspects remained on the premises, the national crime prosecution unit said in an e-mail, without saying if there'd been arrests. Amsterdam's Schiphol airport stayed open. The siege underscores tensions in the Netherlands following the Nov. 2 murder of Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker and critic of Islam. A suspect holding Moroccan and Dutch passports was arrested the same day, and arson attacks on at least two mosques and Islamic schools followed. In the past week, an intelligence agent was suspended for leaking information, De Telegraaf said. ``I am very concerned about the hardening of society in the Netherlands,'' Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said in an interview on NOS television. ``We all need each other. At the moment, we are acting in a very non-Dutch way.'' Police officers stood at roadblocks in the neighborhood of the house under siege, and snipers were on the roofs of homes, images on national television showed. Police have drawn no public link between today's raid and the Van Gogh murder. In the most recent arson attack on a Muslim institution, a fire damaged a primary school in the southern Dutch town of Uden yesterday afternoon, Mayor Joke Kersten said. |
| Posted by:Anonymous5089 |
| #3 does he believe this? We all need each other. The killers don't seem to think so but he seems to be blaming the crowd. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2004-11-10 6:18:00 PM |
| #2 SPOD -- American FBI agents who are members of the Religion of Hacking People to Pieces have refused to take part in investigations of their co-religionists. Translators have had some rather curious conflicts of interest, as well as curiously slow results. So your supposition isn't that too far out on the limb. ``I am very concerned about the hardening of society in the Netherlands,’’ Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said in an interview on NOS television. ``We all need each other. At the moment, we are acting in a very non-Dutch way.’’ Well, many of the non-Dutch in your society ARE acting in a non-Dutch way, yes. It's odd how those things tend to go together. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-11-10 4:27:53 PM |
| #1 A muslim employee of AVID leaked the information. I am reading between the lines but who else? Dutch Political elites get a clue. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2004-11-10 3:40:53 PM |