A train passenger and her child were struck by a collapsed window after people threw rocks at their train car on Thursday. Police said two boys were arrested walking along the train tracks in Heerhugowaard soon after the Thursday afternoon incident.
The train was pelted with rocks at about 12:30 p.m. near Hectorlaan in the Noord-Holland town as the train was approaching the station. Police said they are looking to interview the mother and child, but they have not made contact with authorities.
A 59-year-old man from Eindhoven is accused of raping a 15-year-old girl at a campsite in Luxembourg in 2017. Rob N. does not only deny these charges, but claims that the girl forced him to have sex with her. The Public Prosecution Service demanded 3.5 years in prison against the man in court on Friday, AD reports.
Rob N. and the girl knew each other for some time. According to him, the girl was having a hard time. And because she had never been on vacation, he took her for a weekend at a campsite in Luxembourg in August 2017.
A large quantity of heroin was found hidden on board a ship in Rotterdam just before the end of the year, authorities at the port said. Police and Customs officers discovered some 439 kilograms of the narcotic hidden below a shipment of talc stone during a routine check.
The cargo was still inside a sea container on the ship when it was inspected, police said. Authorities seized and destroyed and destroyed the drugs.
No arrests were announced in the case, police disclosed on Friday. The investigation is still ongoing.
Videos surfaced online showing a motorcycle police officers driving his bike up the stairs of the Rokin subway station on Amsterdam's Noord-Zuid line. Videos from various bystanders started circulating online on Thursday evening, though when the incident happened is not yet clear.
The video shows the officer driving his motorcycle up the stairs. At the top, the rear wheel slips and the bike tips. The officer jumped off the bike and appeared to be unhurt.
The police arrested a 22-year-old man from Arnhem on Wednesday on suspicion of offering about 12 billion stolen usernames names and passwords for sale on website WeLeakInfo. The arrest was made as part of a joint investigation by the Dutch police, the United Kingdom's National Crime Agency, the United States' FBI, and Germany's Bundeskriminalamt.
Two men were hurt in a shooting on Bas Jungeriusstraat in Rotterdam on Thursday evening. They were taken to hospital with serious injuries. The police are investigating what exactly happened.
The shooting happened at around 8:15 p.m. The two victims, 19 and 22 years old, were walking on the street when they were shot. Witnesses report hearing multiple gunshots and seeing multiple perpetrators, the police said in a statement. Shorty before the shooting, the victims were sitting in a car on Bas Jungeriusstraat.
The children found living an isolated existence in a hidden space on a farm in Ruinerwold last year responded to a book about their father Gerrit Jan van D., which is being published on Friday. They were "hit hard" by the book Spookhoeve Ruinerwold, written by journalists Silvan Schoonhoven and Marcel Vink, they said on talk show Op1 on Thursday.
The Netherlands saw a 16 percent increase in criminal discrimination cases filed in the country last year, with 63 cases above the 397 total recorded in 2018, data from the police department shows. It is the second straight year such an increase was posted in annual crime statistics.
Six Dutch people were hurt when their van crashed on the A57 near Goch in Germany on Thursday morning. Three of the victims were seriously hurt, two of which are in critical condition, RTL Nieuws reports.
The accident happened at around 7:00 a.m. on Thursday while the van was trying to overtake a truck. The van hit the truck and ended up on its side, newspaper AD reports.
A helicopter was dispatched to take the injured to hospital.
The A57 towards Cologne was closed for multiple hours.
Streaming media giant Netflix was accused of using the Netherlands as a major part of a tax haven scheme to reduce its income tax liabilities globally. A report released this week by Tax Watch UK said Netflix moved between $327 and $430 million into tax havens in 2018, out of its total global profits that year of $1.2 billion.
Customs officers at the port of Vlissingen intercepted 921 kilograms of cocaine on Tuesday. The drugs were hidden in a container of bananas that came from Ecuador, the police said in a statement.
The drugs were discovered with a mobile scan. The police seized and destroyed the cocaine. So far no arrests were made.
The police are investigating.
Gerrit Jan van D. regularly beat and abused his children in the around nine years they were kept secluded on a farm in Ruinerwold, according to accounts of how he drove "evil spirits" out of them that he wrote down himself and testimony the children gave the police. In some of those "exorcisms" Van D. used his "spiritual sword", the Telegraaf reports based on those accounts, which are described in the book Spookhoeve Ruinerwold set to publish later this week.
After spending years in prison in Thailand, Dutch coffeeshop owner Johan van Laarhoven is on a plane back to the Netherlands. The plane has left Thai airspace and is expected to land at Schiphol Airport on Thursday evening, Van Laarhoven's family confirmed to NU.nl.
"We are incredibly happy with Johan's return," his brother Frans van Laarhoven said to the newspaper. "My family and I can't wait to have him back in our midst."
Since the maximum penalty for murder was increased from 20 to 30 years in prison, the gap with the maximum sentence for manslaughter has become too large, Gerrit van der Burg, the chief executive at the Public Prosecution Service (OM) said to Trouw on Thursday. He wants to increase the maximum prison sentence for manslaughter, which is currently 15 years.
More than 80 kilograms of cocaine was found on a Martinair Cargo plane in Argentina. Seven men, three of whom are Dutch, were arrested, including the plane's pilot and some crew members, RTL Nieuws reports.
The plane was at the Ezeiza International Airport near Buenos Aires when the drugs were discovered. Local media report that the discovery was made shortly before he plane was set to depart for Amsterdam, via Ecuador and Miami.
The police registered a total of 21,302 trafficking related crimes in 2019, an increase of over 16 percent compared to the year before. The increase was mainly due to a spike in weapons trafficking and drug trafficking, according to an initial analysis of crime statistics released on Wednesday.
Ahmad Al Y. is not an asylum seeker who deserves protection, but a war criminal who desecrated the corpses of killed opponents during the Syrian civil war, the Public Prosecutor said during the first proforma hearing in the case against the 30-year-old Syrian man in the high security court at Schiphol on Wednesday, AD reports.
The number of sex crimes the police registered last year decreased by 13 percent compared to 2018, according to an analysis of crime statistics released on Wednesday. The main categories of violent crime combined to show only a slight overall increase in 2019 when compared to the year before, even as there were large increases in categories like forced labor, muggings, and threats of violence.
A suspicious package was found on Amstelveenseweg in Amsterdam Zuid on Wednesday morning. The package was found at kosher restaurant Ha Carmel, which was previously the target of vandalism multiple times.
Eventually, police said no explosives were found in the suspicious package. But Jewish organization Federatief Joods NL said on social media that the "crystal clear" motive behind the incident was anti-Semitism. They noted that the restaurant has been targeted four times in two years.
The police noticed a striking increase in young offenders over the past year, according to annual figures released on Wednesday. More and more young people are turning to online fraud to make some quick cash, or walking around with weapons on the street - a worrying development, according to National Police Chief Erik Akerboom.
In total, over 800 thousand crimes were reported to the police in the Netherlands last year, an increase of 4 percent compared to 2018, according to annual figures the police released. This is the first time in nearly a decade that crime figures showed an increase. In 2010 over a million crimes were reported. That slowly decreased to 770 thousand in 2018. But the downward trend came to an end in the second half of 2018.
Last year people in the Netherlands lost 1,056,805 euros to scams committed through WhatsApp, quadruple the 262,879 euros in damages sustained in 2018, NU.nl reports based on figures from the Fraud Help Desk.
In 2019, the Fraud Help Desk received 2,663 reports of WhatsApp fraud and 353 people actually fell victim to these scams, compared to 655 report and 124 victims in 2018. In the first two weeks of 2020, the hotline received 112 reports of scams and nine people reported falling victim to the scammers, losing over 38 thousand euros.
A possible explosive was found at a cafe on Voorstraat in Zwolle on Tuesday morning. The area around the cafe was cordoned off while explosive removal experts from the Ministry of Defense investigated and removed the device, the Gelderland police said on Twitter.
According to newspaper De Stentor, the explosive involved was a hand grenade and it was found tied to the door of cafe Bruut. Emergency services responded to the scene at around 8:20 a.m.
Three employees of the University of Groningen (RUG) are suspected of embezzling 1.2 million euros in public money from the university and funneling it into their own foundation, the board of the Faculty of Arts announced in a letter that NOS has in its possession. All three employees were affiliated with the Faculty of Arts.
