According to authorities, many persons were kidnapped in a town in central Netherlands on Saturday, causing residences to be evacuated and the town center to close.
According to police, there is now no cause to suspect a “terrorist motive” for the event in Ede.
“A hostage situation involving several people is underway in a building in the centre” of Ede, police said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.
It is unclear how many people are being held, although local media reports that four or five persons are implicated.
Police said they had cleared a perimeter around a cafe and brought inhabitants from approximately 150 houses to safety.
According to the local municipality’s website, the town core has been cordoned off, and riot police and explosives experts are on the scene.
Authorities urged locals to avoid the town centre, and train traffic was rerouted.
“We realize there are numerous doubts about the motivation. At this point, there is no evidence of a terrorist motive,” police stated.
The Netherlands has had a number of terror acts and conspiracies, but not on the same scale as other European countries such as France or the UK.
In 2019, the Netherlands was rocked by a shooting spree on a tram in Utrecht, which took four lives.
Gokmen Tanis, a Turkish-born man, eventually claimed that the rampage, which nearly shut down the country’s fourth largest city, was motivated by terror.
In 2019, Dutch police charged two alleged jihadists with plotting a terror assault including suicide bombs and car bombs. Authorities stated that an attack was planned that year.
In 2018, a young Afghan man known only as “Jawed S.” stabbed two American tourists at Amsterdam Central Station, later telling judges that he wanted “to protect the Prophet Mohammed.”
The attack happened a day after far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders declared that he was canceling a cartoon competition to caricature the Prophet Muhammad.
At the time, Afghan Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid urged Muslims to attack Dutch forces following Wilders’ “hostile act by this country (the Netherlands) against all Muslims.”
In the most serious case of a terror assault, outspoken Dutch anti-Islam film director Theo van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death in Amsterdam in 2004 by a man linked to a Dutch Islamist terror network.