Gunman kills 3 on tram, suspect arrested

Three people were killed and five were injured on Monday when at least one gunman opened fire on a tram in Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

The authorities called it a possible terrorist attack, though they did not rule out other motives, and some reports attributed the shooting to a domestic dispute.

After a nearly eight-hour manhunt, the police said they had arrested a Turkish-born man who had been identified as a suspect in the shooting. It was not clear how many people were involved.

The local police and the national anti-terrorism agency said they were looking into the possibility that the shooting, between 10:30 and 11 a.m., was an act of terrorism. Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, said it could not be ruled out.

The mayor of Utrecht, Jan van Zanen, was more definitive. “We are working on the assumption of a terrorist motive,” he said.

But later in the day, the police said they were also considering that the motive might have been personal.

According to the Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu, relatives of the man sought by the police said the shooting stemmed from a family dispute, and only one person had been the intended target. Similar accounts came from people who knew him in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands’ main counterterrorism agency raised its assessment of the threat in Utrecht Province, just southeast of Amsterdam, to the highest level, and said it had activated a crisis team.

Pieter Jaap Aalbersberg, the national coordinator for antiterrorism and security, said the authorities were debating whether to expand the threat alert to the country as a whole.

The authorities ordered the evacuation of all mosques in Utrecht, and security was increased at mosques elsewhere in the Netherlands.

It was not clear whether those moves stemmed from any specific threat, or whether they were a precaution in the wake of the attacks on two mosques last week in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 50 people.

The University Medical Center Utrecht opened a specialized disaster unit in response to the shooting. Mr. van Zanen, the mayor, said three of those injured were seriously hurt.

Mr. Rutte interrupted a weekly cabinet meeting to monitor the situation, and later held a news conference to address it.

Authorities raised the terrorism threat to its highest level in Utrecht province, schools were told to shut their doors and paramilitary police increased security at airports and other vital infrastructure, and also at mosques.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte convened crisis talks, saying he was deeply concerned about the incident, which came three days after a lone gunman killed 50 people in mass shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.

“The police asks you to watch out for 37-year-old Gokman Tanis (born in Turkey) in connection with this morning’s incident,” Dutch police said in a statement.

They issued an image of the man and warned the public not to approach him. They gave no further details.

 

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