A 19-year-old Afghan who stabbed two American tourists in Amsterdam was shot just nine seconds after he launched his attack, the city’s police chief has revealed.
Commissioner Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg said a special “spotter” had been watching the suspect when he pulled out a knife at Amsterdam’s central station.
Moments later teenager Jawed S was shot in the hip, he said.
The suspect’s lawyer has revealed the man had expected to die in the attack.
Who is the suspect?
Jawed S, an asylum seeker who arrived in Germany in 2015, had travelled by train to Amsterdam on Friday. The German authorities say they were tipped off in February that he had become radicalised while living at a youth facility.
“My client appears to have made the assumption that he wasn’t going to survive his attack, because a will was found at his home in Germany,” said lawyer Simon van der Woude.
He believed the teenager had been acting in response to a cartoon competition proposed by anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, as well as an earlier video involving the Prophet Muhammad.
Dutch prosecutors said this week that Jawed S had had a “terrorist motive” and had been “of the opinion that in the Netherlands the Prophet Muhammad, Islam and the Koran were insulted”.
