Drugs

Police arrested a 28-year-old man in connection with a Nov. 12 shooting in Amsterdam that wounded a 45-year-old man. A second person is still at large, but a description of that person was not released.

Customs officers in the Netherlands found 70 kilograms of cocaine hidden inside the hold of a ship in Amsterdam harbor. The street value of the seized cocaine is €1.7 million, according to financial crimes investigation service FIOD.

So far, nobody was arrested in connection with the raid. The cargo ship arrived in the Netherlands from Brazil, and was carrying grain.

The packages of cocaine were found on December 16, but authorities only first revealed the bust on Monday. The drugs were later destroyed.

Michel Z., a 48-year-old former equipment manager for Feyenoord, is suspected of murdering Raouf Ben Alita in Belgium last week. A Belgian court ordered his arrest, Belgian newspaper De Gazet van Antwerpen reports.

Customs officers found hundreds of kilograms of hard drugs during a check at a storage company in Hazerswoude Dorp, Zuid-Holland on Tuesday. The drugs were hidden in a shipment of Christmas decorations, FIOD, the Tax Authority's investigative department, said on Thursday.

The decorations and drugs were set to be shipped to England. The drugs were seized and destroyed. FIOD and the police are investigating.

A FIOD spokesperson could not tell NOS what type of drugs were involved. 

Two men were injured in a shooting in a home on Amerstraat in Breda on Saturday. Mayor Paul Depla ordered the home locked down on Sunday after an amount of soft drugs was also found in the home, ANP reports. 

Two Amsterdam criminals were arrested for murdering a Colombian couple in southern Spain in August 2016, Het Parool reports.

According to the newspaper, the criminals in question are 28-year-old Abdelhamid A. and 23-year-old Hicham M. Amsterdam man 23-year-old Mitchel Jansen was also a suspect in this double murder, but he was assassinated in Colombia at the end of 2016.

The double murder happened in Mijas, on the Costa del Sol in the Spanish province of Malaga. According to the newspaper, the murders were drug-related. 

Dutch drug criminals are increasingly involved in making crystal meth. Over the past year, 10 crystal meth laboratories were dismantled in the Netherlands. "A few years ago, we hardly ever saw it", a police spokesperson said to NRC, calling 2018 a "turning point" in the production of meth.

Sixteen sports bags full of drugs were discovered in a material container on the terrain of the Van Braam Houckgeest barracks in Doorn on Tuesday. It involved dozens of kilograms of what seems to be cocaine, the Koninklijke Marechausssee, a policing force that works as part of the Dutch military, said on Twitter. 

The drugs were sent to the Netherlands Forensic Institution for testing.

The police arrested a 40-year-old man from The Hague on the suspicion that he detonated hand grenades at two coffeeshops in Delft in May. The man had a hand grenade, weapons and ammunition in his car when he was arrested last month, the Public Prosecutor announced on Monday.

The Number of Dutch people in foreign prisons is falling rapidly. For the first time in years there are fewer than 2 thousand Dutch in a foreign cell, AD reports based on figures from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Five years ago 2,542 Dutch were in prison abroad. As of January 1st of this year, that number dropped to 1,935. The number of Dutch imprisoned in a foreign country for drug-related crimes dropped especially sharply: from 1,679 to 971.

A 34-year-old man was seriously injured in a shooting on Rijksweg Zuid in Geleen on Sunday morning. He died of his injuries in hospital later that day. A woman was also injured. She was allowed to leave the hospital on Sunday afternoon, NU.nl reports.

The incident happened around 7:00 a.m. on the street of the Limburg city. Multiple shots were fired in front of a house on Rijksweg Zuid, after which the suspects fled in the car. The getaway car was found in nearby Brunssum. Two suspects were arrested, and more arrests may follow, the police said according to the newspaper.