Police evacuate train in Amsterdam Zuid; Travelers told to get off with hands up

The police and Koninklijke Marechaussee evacuated a train at Amsterdam Zuid station on Wednesday morning after receiving a report of an armed person on board. Travelers were instructed to get off the train with their hands up and were frisked one by one on the platform, an involved traveler told AT5.

The evacuation started around 11:00 a.m. The train pulled into the station, but the doors didn’t open, the traveler said. “The message was that it was a technical fault.” About five minutes later, a woman walked through the train and told everyone to go outside with their hands up. “There were quite a lot of police with bulletproof vests, military police, and police dogs.”

“We were frisked one by one and were allowed to leave the platform,” the traveler said. “It went very calmly. There was no panic. Other passengers were waiting downstairs. We were not allowed to to go upstairs.”

A police spokesperson told AT5 that they searched the train after a report of an armed person on board a train coming from Breda. The police frisked around 300 passengers and searched the train, but found no weapon. No arrests were made, the spokesperson said.

An NS spokesperson told ANP that the police were on the train to “clean it, to check that there is nothing strange in it, or has been left behind.”

Photos from the scene show that the police responded in very large numbers. Multiple police vehicles were parked outside the station. A police helicopter also circled above the station until around 11:15 a.m. The Koninklijke Marechaussee, a policing force that works as part of the military and is responsible for border security, among other things, was also at the scene.

The police are investigating who made the report and whether it was deliberately a false report.

The incident caused delays and cancellations to several trains making a stop at the station, with disruptions possible until about 1:15 p.m., a spokesperson for the NS told ANP. An annual report from 2023 showed that about 61,000 people use the Amsterdam Zuid station on a daily basis, making it the third largest by volume in the area, after Amsterdam Centraal and Schiphol Airport