Free Republic

AMSTERDAM — Shots were fired as police raided a building on the Moerweg in The Hague on Friday. Dutch parliament buildings hermetically sealed by police Witnesses reported seeing masked men with automatic weapons entering a flat complex on Moerweg which has been sealed off by the police. Radio 1 News was told of people hearing gunfire. The police in The Hague have declined to comment at this stage about the reports. A spokesperson would only say police operations are taking place at several locations in the city. She would also not confirm that a raid was carried out at a...

Amsterdam Airport Fire Kills 11 AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A fire roared through a prison complex at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Thursday, killing 11 illegal immigrants awaiting deportation and injuring 15 other people, authorities said. The nationalities of the dead were not immediately known. "They were illegal aliens waiting to be extradited to their countries of origin," said Immigration Service spokesman Martin Bruinsma. "We are still busy trying to confirm their identities." The prison block on the east side of Europe's fourth largest airport is surrounded by a 10-foot fence and barbed wire. Set up in 2002, it is used to...

Fifteen minutes after KLM Flight 685 took off from Amsterdam for Mexico City on April 8, Mexican authorities forwarded the names of all the passengers to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The reason: the flight was scheduled to pass through U.S. airspace. by the time the Boeing 747 had finished its three-hour crossing of the Atlantic, Homeland Security screeners were on high alert. The names of two Saudi passengers aboard the KLM flight had begun producing "hits" on the screening center's lists of 70,000 suspect foreigners. The two Saudis, the database reported, were brothers and pilots who had attended...

WHEN Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, collected his post from the letterbox on Wednesday he got an unpleasant surprise. Among the bills and junk mail was a letter addressing him as “ugly dog”. It told him he would soon be beheaded. It was an unnerving way to start the day. Only 24 hours earlier Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker.

An alleged accomplice of an Iraqi suspected of channeling holy-war fighters to his country for suicide attacks against U.S. forces has been arrested in the Netherlands, German authorities said Monday. The 32-year-old Iraqi, whose name was not released, had been at large since the other man's arrest in Munich last Tuesday. He was arrested by Dutch security officials at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport when he attempted to board a plane to Turkey, Munich prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld said. The German warrant for his arrest cites charges of forming to a criminal organization, he said. The first suspect was arrested on charges of...