World News

Netherlands, Saying It Foiled a Major Terrorist Attack, Arrests 7

BRUSSELS — Authorities in the Netherlands said Friday that they had foiled “very advanced” plans for a large, multisite terrorist attack, arresting seven men and seizing guns and bomb-making materials.

Posted Updated

By
Milan Schreuer
, New York Times

BRUSSELS — Authorities in the Netherlands said Friday that they had foiled “very advanced” plans for a large, multisite terrorist attack, arresting seven men and seizing guns and bomb-making materials.

The arrests were part of a coordinated police operation Thursday across several towns and cities, officials said.

The Netherlands has not experienced a major attack in the wave of terrorist activity that has occurred in Western Europe since 2015.

“The suspects were looking for AK-47s, handguns, hand grenades, bomb belts and the building materials for one or more car bombs,” and for training in their use, according to a statement from the Public Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague.

Investigators said they think the men wanted to use bombs and AK-47s to attack a mass event, while simultaneously detonating a car bomb elsewhere, but police were not certain of their exact targets.

The suspects had made significant progress in their efforts to procure “AK-47s and bomb belts — really terribly dangerous stuff,” the Dutch justice minister, Ferdinand Grapperhaus, said on national television. “But they hadn’t advanced so far that a threat to the population was imminent, or that it was almost too late,” he added.

While terrorist attacks have occurred across Europe since early 2015, their number and intensity have decreased. The Dutch authorities said Friday that this trend was the result of increased police surveillance in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe, not because of a decline in terrorists’ determination.

Information from the Dutch domestic intelligence service had led prosecutors to begin investigating one suspect, who lived in Arnhem, in April, the Public Prosecutor’s Office said in another statement. Tracking him led them to the six others in towns and cities across the Netherlands. The seven, they said, had formed a terrorist cell.

Authorities were not looking for other suspects, the authorities said, that the Dutch cell had no suspected ties with other cells outside the country.

“The investigation advanced quickly when the suspects started to make far-reaching progress,” the statement continued.

On Thursday afternoon, the seven men, who are between 21 and 34, were arrested in Arnhem, a provincial town near the eastern border with Germany, and in Weert, a small town on the border with Belgium. Five handguns were seized during the arrests.

At the same time, police officers raided the suspects’ homes. Three lived in Arnhem, two in Rotterdam and one each in Huissen and Vlaardingen.

During the raids, police confiscated “sizable amounts” of raw materials used to make explosives for bomb belts and 100 kilograms, or more than 220 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, an ingredient in car bombs, the authorities said. The police also confiscated a rented bus in Weert.

The Dutch threat level remained at 4 out of 5, meaning a terrorist attack is considered “likely.”

“The threat of an attack remains real,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on national television Friday. “My call to everyone is: All events just continue, the biggest present we can give to these types is that we adapt our lives.”

Geert Wilders, a far-right populist politician and the leader of the major opposition party in the Netherlands, reacted Friday in a tweet calling Rutte a “coward” and a “capitulating Islam-lover” who had allowed “thousands of jihadis” to enter the country.

On Friday afternoon, the seven suspects were led before a judge in Rotterdam, who ordered them held in solitary confinement with access only to their lawyers.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.