illegal fireworks

The police discovered 200 kilograms of illegal fireworks during a check in the Gelderland village of Terschuur on Monday. A 28-year-old man from Poland was arrested, the police said in a statement.

Police officers noticed a somewhat battered car showing technical defects on the Uilengoor parking lot at around 11:00 a.m. The car also seemed to be heavily loaded - it was slumping through its axles, the police said. The officers decided to check the vehicle and found that the trunk was full of illegal fireworks.

Police in the Noord-Holland town of Vijfhuizen found over 10,000 kilograms of fireworks stashed in a warehouse on Vijfhuizerdijk. Authorities said they were acting on an anonymous tip when they raided the facility.

The haul of illegal, heavy fireworks was so large, police said they needed two separate trucks to carry all of them away. Many of the fireworks were kept in boxes that identified F4-classification devices. Those are fireworks that are designated for professional use only.

A 39-year-old man killed in a fireworks explosion in Swifterbant on Saturday, was killed by a mortar bomb - a dangerous type of firework that is illegal in the Netherlands, NOS reports.

The police already suspected that the man was killed by illegal fireworks, and investigation revealed that it was a mortar.

The police have too little manpower to check all signals about illegal fireworks, according to Gerrit van de Kamp of police union ACP. There are simply not enough police officers to go check every address where illegal fireworks are suspected, RTL Nieuws reports.

The police are intensively searching for illegal fireworks providers and buyers, but they can't keep up. "That stuff is traded across the entire country", Van der Kamp said. "The police want to check all suspicions, but the amount of work is too great." 

Anonymous tip line Report Crime Anonymously gave a record number of 16,900 tips through to the police last year. Thanks to these anonymous tips a total of 1,671 suspects were arrested and more than 1,100 crimes were solved or prevented, the tip line announced with its annual figures on Tuesday, ANP reports.

About one in three tips received by the hot line is eventually given through to the police. The majority of the tips were made by telephone and about a quarter came in online. 

The Dutch police do not always keep to safety regulations when it comes to storing confiscated illegal fireworks, Omroep Brabant reports based on its own research. Officers often don't have the proper training and the cabinets used to store dangerous bangers do not meet the safety requirements. This already led to dozens of incidents, according to the broadcaster.

The Dutch police want parents to be more alert in checking their children and their children's friends for illegal fireworks, Ad Nieuwdorp, fireworks expert at the National Police, said to AD. He called parents "naive" when it comes to dangerous fireworks.

"A cobra is just a grenade and totally not comparable to the strikers and astronauts they themselves lit as a teenager" Nieuwdorp said to the newspaper. He added that a legal soft banger going off in a hand will leave a child with burns, an illegal banger wil blow the hand off. 

So far the Dutch police seized 14 thousand kilograms of illegal fireworks, according to the Public Prosecutor's weekly fireworks barometer which started up in the second week of October. By this time last year, the police already seized over 32 thousand kilograms of illegal fireworks, ANP reports.

The Public Prosecutor thinks the decrease can be explained by the trade in illegal fireworks starting up later this year than usual. A number of previously illegal fireworks were also classified legal this year. 

A 25-year-old man from the Gelderland town of Aalst was arrested on Tuesday for running a website trading illegal fireworks. The police found illegal fireworks and two firearms in his home, the police said in a statement.

The police arrested three people in the Zeeland town of Axel as part of an ongoing investigation into the trafficking of illegal fireworks, the police said in a statement on Sunday. Hundreds of kilos of illegal fireworks were confiscated.

The police seized 45,268 kilograms of fireworks in the weeks running up to New Year's, according to the Public Prosecutor's fireworks barometer. At this time last year, 39,566 kilos of illegal fireworks were seized.