robbery

Police in 30 different Dutch municipalities failed to apprehend a suspect in a single burglary reported in their jurisdictions in the past three years. There were over two thousand break-ins reported in those towns and villages between May 2016 and May 2019, all of which went unsolved, a data analysis from RTL Nieuws showed.

Three 17-year-old boys were arrested on suspicion of assaulting and robbing a 47-year-old man in Bilthoven on August 19th. The victim went to the scene because of a date he made through dating app Grindr. 

The man, from Soest, met his date at a parking lot in Bilthoven as agreed through the app. The two walked into the forest on Dwarspad, where five other young men were waiting for them. .

Two people from the Netherlands were killed in a robbery in Marloth Park, a holiday town situated in the South African Province of Mpumalanga, on Wednesday afternoon. Local media identify the victims as a 53-year-old man and a 75-year-old woman. They suffocated after being tied up and gagged by the robbers.

Police spokesperson Leonard Hlathi told News24 that a family of three and a visitor were in the house in Marloth Park when two men approached them asking for work. When the family said they had no work available, they were ambushed.

The Domino's Pizza on Biljmerplein in Amsterdam Zuidoost will equip its delivery workers with bodycams to protect them against robbery. "It is almost certain that this plan will continue", spokesperson Marianne Kemps of Domino's Pizza said to Het Parool. 

Domino's already successfully experimented with bodycams, subsidized by the center for crime prevention and security CCV, in Rotterdam. In the areas where meal deliverers wore bodycams, the robberies stopped. "We saw that wearing the bodycams alone deters robbers. In addition, the delivery staff felt safer", Kemps said. 

Three women were attacked in the vicinity of Wageningen University over the past week and a half, the police said in a statement on Sunday. The police are investigating whether the cases are connected.

The latest attack happened between 11:30 p.m. and midnight on Saturday. A 22-year-old student was cycling between Marijkeweg and Haarweg when she was attacked by three men who wanted to steal her bag. The men jumped from behind some bushes and threatened her with a weapon. She managed to get away with her bag and a number of minor injuries, the police said.

Police in Enschede arrested a 33-year-old man on suspicion of burglary after he was found in the middle of the night by a three-year-old boy. The boy awoke late Monday night to the sound of loud footsteps in the garden behind his house.

“He thought there were maybe animals or monsters there. However, it was a wild, strange man,” police said in a statement.

Authorities praised the boy for alerting his mother to the suspicious person. She saw he was carrying a television and an electric bike and quickly called emergency services.

The student campuses in Amsterdam are not safe, student union ASVA warns. The union received 39 reports of incidents over the last two months alone, mainly involving incidents of violence, sexual offenses, robbery and burglary, AD reports.

A large part of these reports came from the Spinoza Campus and the nearby apartment buildings Echtenstein and Bergwijkdreef in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Students also feel unsafe at the campus on the NDSM wharf, according to ASVA.

After five consecutive years of consistent decrease, the number of crimes registered in the Netherlands increased in the first quarter of 2019. In the first three months of this year, 5 percent more crimes were registered than in the first quarter of 2018, according to figures the police released on Monday. 

On Tuesday the court in The Hague sentenced a 44-year-old man to 20 years in prison for brutally robbing and murdering 85-year-old Ans van der Meer from The Hague in 2017. His 35-year-old partner was sentenced to nine months in prison for laundering the loot, NU.nl reports.

Friends found the elderly woman dead in her flat in Loosduinen in June 2017. She had been severely beaten. Her sternum was broken, as was her thoracic vertebra, nine ribs and nose. The woman died from suffocation.

Since the past summer, over 60 people have been violently robbed of their Rolex watches in Amsterdam. The thieves often strike in the evening hours, overpowering victims on the street and robbing them of their expensive watches, RTL Nieuws reports. 

Continuing the trend of past years, the number of registered crimes in the Netherlands dropped in 2018. The police registered a total of 766,638 crimes, a decrease of 6.1 percent compared to 2017. However, the police note that the decrease is slowing down. "The decline seems to have come to an end in the last six months", the police said.