Three people have been killed and several more injured after a shooting on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht.Police said they were investigating a “possible terrorist motive” after the attacker, a 37-year-old Turkish-born man, fired shots inside the tram before fleeing. A police search for the suspect continues.<\/p>\n
However reports in the Netherlands and Turkey cast the terror link into doubt, with a suggestion the shooting was a family dispute. The mayor of Utrecht, Jan van Zanen, said five passengers were injured, down from an earlier figure of nine, with three seriously hurt.<\/p>\n
Officers have issued a public appeal for information relating to Gokmen Tanis in connection with the shooting.<\/p>\n
Heavily armed anti-terror officers were seen gathering in front of an apartment block close to the tram stop where the shooting took place, however no arrests were made.<\/p>\n
Dutch military police have been put on “extra alert” at airports and “vital buildings” and heavily armed officers were deployed to government offices in The Hague.<\/p>\n
German police have also upped surveillance on the country’s border with the Netherlands, with officers told to monitor not only major highways, but also minor crossings and railway routes.<\/p>\n
Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, said he was “deeply concerned” about the incident as he announced crisis talks chaired by the government.<\/p>\n
Schools in the city were instructed to keep their doors closed, with the terror threat in the wider province of Utrecht raised to its highest level.<\/p>\n
However there was some confusion later on Monday over whether the attack had a terrorism link, with the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper citing a witness who said the gunman had targeted one woman on the tram and then shot other people who had tried to help her.<\/p>\n
Turkey’s Anadolu news agency claimed the gunman fired shots at a relative on the tram “due to family reasons”.\u00a0 \u200bPolice, paramedics and three air ambulances were quickly on the scene of the shooting at 10.45am on Monday.<\/p>\n
Local broadcaster RTV Utrecht quoted an eyewitness as saying he had seen a woman lying on the ground amid some kind of confrontation. Several men ran away from the scene, the witness said.<\/p>\n
One woman was reportedly shot in the chest. It was not immediately clear the extent of the other victims’ injuries.<\/p>\n
Jan van Zanen, the mayor of Utrecht, described the shooting as a “horrible and radical incident in which victims have fallen”. He added: “Police and the public prosecutor are currently looking for the person or persons responsible for this incident.<\/p>\n
“The most important thing at present is taking care of the wounded and investigating the circumstances of the incident. We do not exclude anything, not even a terrorist attack.”<\/p>\n
Jeremy Hunt, the British foreign secretary, described the incident as “hugely concerning” and said the UK “stands with the people of the Netherlands”.<\/p>\n
The incident took place close at the city’s 24 Oktoberplein, a major junction and tram stop outside the city centre. After the shooting, Dutch political parties halted campaigning ahead of a provincial election scheduled for Wednesday that will also determine the makeup of the parliament’s upper house.<\/p>\n
Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, has a large student population with the country’s largest university and is around 20 minutes south of Amsterdam by train. Gun killings are rare in the city, as elsewhere in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
The incident comes after a lone gunman killed 50 people in mass shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, last Friday.<\/p>\n
Source:\u00a0The Independent<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three people have been killed and several more injured after a shooting on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht.Police said they were investigating a “possible terrorist motive” after the attacker, a 37-year-old Turkish-born man, fired shots inside the tram before fleeing. A police search for the suspect continues. However reports in the Netherlands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-world-news"],"yoast_head":"\n