Wilders' tale of trash collector attacked by Moroccans was a simple "traffic dispute"

The story PVV Geert Wilders told in the budget debate about a Utrecht trash collector getting severely assaulted with “twenty Moroccans interfering” was a traffic dispute. Both the police and the other woman involved in this incident confirmed this to Nieuwsuur.

Wilders opened his two-hour-long contribution to the budget debate last month with an email he received from a woman working as a trash collector in Utrecht. “A hardworking young mother of two, who works on a garbage truck in a big city,” Wilders said. According to him, the trash collector was working when a woman in a headscarf verbally abused her. A man with the woman then allegedly punched her hard in the face, and a group of “twenty Moroccans” interfered in the incident.

The police told Nieuwsuur that they “didn’t recognize Wilders’ story” as he told it. The police registered the case as a traffic dispute. The trash collector did get a blow, which officers at the scene described as a “simple assault,” a police spokesperson told the program. There was no large group of Moroccans, the police said.

The woman in the headscarf involved in this incident confirmed that to Nieuwsuur. “This was a traffic dispute,” Lina, not her real name, told the program. She stressed that there are two sides to this story. She filed a complaint today against the trash collector, accusing the woman of threatening her.

Lina was hurt when she found out that Wilders used the traffic dispute she was involved in to argue that the Netherlands is becoming “more un-Dutch, unsafe, and unliveable by the day” due to “the masses of non-Western immigrants” who are “failing to integrate.”

“I’m also a hardworking mother of two young children,” Lina said. “I care for Dutch elderly people with a lot of love. They absolutely adore me, so this has nothing to do with being Dutch or not. This was a traffic dispute.” She added, “I also have a Dutch passport and I belong here.”

This is not the first time in his campaign for the upcoming parliamentary elections that the police had to correct Wilders. At the end of August, Wilders claimed that the suspect in the murder of 17-year-old Lisa had been arrested and released a week before killing the teenage girl. This turned out to be untrue.