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A 29-year-old Dutchman was shot by military police at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam after menacing people with a knife on Friday. The airport is one of the five busiest in Europe and sits just outside of the picturesque city of Amsterdam and handled 63.6 million passengers just in 2016, breaking records set in prior years.
According to police spokesman Stan Verberkt, they have no reason to believe that the man’s actions were motivated by terrorism (hopefully he is just crazy).
The suspect was a 29-year-old man from The Hague and “The man is known to the police in connection with previous violent incidents.” Evidently, he had walked into the police services office in Schiphol’s main plaza area and threatened staff with a knife. Officers shot the man in the leg and arrested him prior to transporting him to a hospital. Air traffic at the airport was not affected by the incident and the airport’s main plaza area was only evacuated briefly.
As someone who has flown into and out of Schiphol airport, I can tell you that their security is top notch. When I flew into the airport in May 2001, I had coffee in their main plaza prior to walking outside to catch the train into the city. It was clean and orderly and regularly patrolled by a visible police presence. When you flew out of Schiphol, even prior to 9/11/2001, they would separate the members of your traveling party and ask their security questions of each traveler in order to ensure that their stories matched. In my humble, civilian opinion, the Dutch security policies were ahead of their time. Victory Girls will keep an eye out for additional developments over the weekend; hopefully, this will be the last we hear about this incident.
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