Police expect over 1,000 explosive attacks this year; No fatalities a "small miracle"

The number of explosive attacks in the Netherlands is increasing alarmingly and the police expect that 2024 will end with well over 1,000 such attacks committed in the year. The police called it “a small miracle” that, except for one person dying when an explosive he was placing went off early this year, there have been no fatalities. The police also reported that the number of assassinations is decreasing and that the gunmen are getting younger on average in its Violence and Organized Crime report.

The number of explosive attacks increased from 212 in 2021 to a massive 1,017 last year. So far this year, there have been 923 attacks. Over 70 percent of attacks took place in the Randstad, and more than a third in the cities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague.

According to the police, the attacks increasingly seem to be personal in nature, and not in the organized crime environment. “Based on the incidents investigated in 2023, it is estimated that over half of them involved ‘homemade conflicts’ between non-criminal citizens. These are often conflicts in the relational sphere,” the researchers said.

Around 80 percent of explosive attacks are committed with heavy, illegal fireworks with flash powder. “These are almost always crackers, often of the Cobra brand,” the police said. “These fireworks have the power of a military explosive such as TNT and have devastating effects. Especially when used in combination with fuel.”

It is partly due to that that the police call it a “small miracle” that there haven’t been more fatalities. “It helps that most attacks are committed at night and are mainly aimed at intimidation because the danger posed by these types of incidents is really enormous,” the researchers said, “In addition, the trade of this type of fireworks and the transport and storage thereof also pose major risks.”

The police also reported that the number of criminal assassinations decreased significantly. In 2013, there were 13 such premeditated assassinations in the criminal environment. Last year, there were three. Between 2016 to 2013, there were 141 cases of murder and manslaughter in the criminal environment, out of a total of 965 homicides. Over half of the criminal killings happened in the cocaine trafficking world.

The researchers noticed that assassinations are increasingly ordered from the “own camp” instead of by the “enemy.” The most common motives for “own camp” assassinations are lack of performance, theft, or talking to the authorities. “The prevailing image that mainly opponents in the environment eliminate each other needs to be corrected: the danger comes more often from within than from outside one’s own criminal network,” the researchers said.

They also noted that the perpetrators are getting younger on average, but they attribute this mostly to fewer older perpetrators than more younger ones. For example, in 2017, the oldest shooter was 50 years old. In 2023, the oldest gunman was 30.