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Dutch Soldiers Lay Siege to House After Officers Hurt (Update1)
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 2004-11-10 |
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