(Eagle News) — Dutch flags on government buildings were flown at half-mast Tuesday, March 19, following the shooting on a tram in Utrecht on Monday, March 18, that left three people dead in what officials said was a possible terror attack.
Prime Minister Rutte announced at a press conference how Monday’s attack in Utrecht was an “attack in the heart of our country.”
“This is an attack in the heart of our country. Innocent people have been torn away from their environment. The whole of the Netherlands sympathizes intensively,” he said.
He said that a “sense of horror and disbelief prevails over the terrible events of today.”
Dutch police on Monday arrested a Turkish-born suspect, Gokmen Tanis, 37, for the tram attack after the police had launched a manhunt.
The police issued a picture of the suspected gunman and warned the public not to approach him.
Five other people were also wounded in the tram attack in the Utrecht neighborhood of Kanaleneiland.
Mosques and schools were closed across the Netherlands’ fourth-largest city following the bloodshed, before heavily armed officers surrounded a building and arrested him.
Dutch authorities said they were still investigating a likely terrorist motive for the shooting but Prime Minister Rutte said they “cannot exclude” other motives, including a family dispute.
“We have just heard that the suspect we are looking for has been arrested,” Utrecht police chief Rob van Bree told a dramatic press conference seconds after being handed a piece of paper with news of the arrest.
This came at the end of the afternoon press conference between Mayor Van Zanen of Utrecht, together with the chief public prosecutor and the Utrecht police chief.
The three, however, did not give any other explanation regarding the arrest of 37-year-old Tanis who has been confronted with a series of crimes in recent years.
Moreover, nothing is known about the motive of the suspect.
The authorities, however, are not excluding a terrorist purpose.
The threat level in Utrecht has also been reduced to the second highest level 4. This level also applies to the rest of the country.
The city’s mayor Jan van Zanen told the same news conference it was a “black day for Utrecht”, while prosecution officer Rutger Jeuken said that “it looks like what we are dealing with is a terrorist motive”.
The drama began when gunfire broke out on a tram near the 24 Oktoberplein square, sending people fleeing from the tram and triggering a huge police response.
One witness told broadcaster NOS they saw an injured woman running out of the tram with blood on her hands and clothes who then fell to the ground.
“I brought her into my car and helped her. When the police arrived, she was unconscious,” the witness, who was not named, told the broadcaster.
A body covered in a white sheet could later be seen lying on the tram tracks.
Police then launched a massive manhunt during which the suspected gunman is believed to have carjacked a Renault Clio before being arrested about seven hours later, around three kilometres (two miles) from the attack site.
Security forces were on high alert at airports and other government buildings following the attack, which came just days after 50 people were killed at mosques in New Zealand in a rampage by an alleged white supremacist.
Dutch national counter-terrorism chief Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg said authorities had lowered the terror threat in Utrecht one notch from the top level after “the arrest of the main suspect for the shooting”.
Rutte said afterwards that the Netherlands would “never give way to intolerance”.
“There are many questions and rumours,” he told a news conference in The Hague. “What the motive is, terrorist or other, we don’t yet know, but we can’t exclude anything.”
(with a report from Malou Francisco, Eagle News correspondent in The Netherlands, and a report from Agence France Presse)
