One killed in Amsterdam house fire; crime suspected

A man was killed in an apartment fire in Amsterdam on Thursday night. The police believe a crime was involved and an investigation is ongoing at the scene on Friday, AT5 reports . The fire started in an apartment on the first floor of an apartment building on Barbusselaan around 10:30 p.m. Emergency services rushed to the scene and found a victim in a storage area. Firefighters took the man outside, where emergency services tried to resuscitate him. It was to no avail. He died at the scene. Around midnight, when the fire department already left, the fire in the apartment flared up again. Three surrounding apartments were damaged and are now uninhabitable. The police are at the scene again on Friday. A "comprehensive investigation" was launched, a spokesperson said to AT5. The police are investigating whether the victim was murdered and whether arson was involved in the fire. One neighbor described the victim as a strange man to Het Parool. "Our neighbor lived lone. Sometimes he was normal and said hello. 'How are you and the kids?' But sometimes he was weird and confused. We saw that clearly in his behavior. He did not want you to come in. You could not even come close to his window or look inside", the neighbor said. "I had no problems with him", she continued. "Sometimes he complained at seven o'clock in the evening that he could not sleep because the children made too much noise. Even turning on the radio did not help, he said. I always had the feeling that something could go wrong. It was not safe for him to live alone. Sometimes people came to clean his house, but he needed counseling." According to Het Parool, the victim was known to both public health service GGD and the Salvation Army.