Companies targeted by mail bombs not clients of collections agency

None of the companies that received mail bombs and threatening letters over the past two weeks were customers of central collections agency CIB, director Niels de Peuter said to AD on Tuesday after consulting with the police. The envelopes the bombs and threats were sent in were made to look like they came from the CIB.

"We want to let our real customers know about this, to reassure them that there are probably not mail bombs on the way to them," De Peuter said to the newspaper. "Because it doesn't look like someone is working down our customer base."

The police already stressed that the CIB has nothing to do with the mail bombs, sent to seven businesses in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Maastricht over the past two weeks. All mail bombs were followed by a threatening letter. Some companies received a threatening letter, but no mail bomb - a total of 10 threatening letters have so far been found, AD writes. None of the bombs exploded.

Because some companies did not realize that the letters were not from the CIB, they mistakenly sent the mail bombs back to the agency, according to NU.nl. One mail bomb actually reached the CIB, the other was intercepted at a mail sorting center in Rotterdam.

As the affected companies are not clients of the CIB, it seems that the name of the Rotterdam collection agency was randomly chosen to be the "sender" of the bombs.