Prosecutor: machine gun and 200 rounds lay under Osdorp gym
At the first public hearing in the Amsterdam court on Wednesday, the public prosecutor set out what investigators pulled from the rubble of a cellar box on the Remijden in Amsterdam-Osdorp. Alongside the explosives material there was a pistol and a machine gun with a feed holding two hundred rounds. Officers also recovered a large quantity of flash powder, ziplock bags and rolls of duct tape, the standard kit for blowing open cash machines. The explosion itself happened on 12 June, in an outbuilding beneath a gym.
Seven people were hurt, two of them seriously, and four hundred residents had to leave their homes. Two men, aged 23 and 24, are accused of causing the explosion and of preparing cash machine raids in what the prosecution calls criminal Box 171. Both were badly hurt themselves. One lost both legs and part of a hand and spent time in a coma, and his severed foot was found in the debris. The other suffered very severe burns. DNA on the recovered material points mainly to the first man, and also matched duct tape secured in Germany after a cash machine raid on 22 May.
The prosecutor spent as much time on the silence around the case as on the evidence. She told the court that police and prosecutors never heard what the neighbourhood already knew, and that one of the men training in the gym that evening, who pulled a suspect out from under the rubble, is still being threatened to stop him speaking to police. She called that threat typical of the criminal system the two accused belong to in that part of the city.
Both men stay in custody and the next hearing is set for 1 December. If you live near the Remijden and were moved out in June, damage and insurance claims run separately from the criminal case, so keep your own paperwork and dates together. Anyone who saw something in the weeks before 12 June can still pass it on without giving their name through the anonymous crime line on 0800 7000.