Algemeen Dagblad reported that the police have been heavily deployed and they have closed off the entire street, after masked gunmen opened fire in a children’s playground on Friday.
Police have confirmed that the victim had been shot several times. The wounded were taken to the hospital – one of them a young girl – but their injuries are not known. The detectives have started an extensive investigation.
Local residents told Het Parool that the shots rang out at the community center. The masked perpetrators appeared to have been looking specifically for the victims. Bystanders claimed the victim was a teenage boy who was shot dead.
The residential area of Grote Wittesburgstraat houses a youth club where activities including a cooking club for children were taking place.
The dead victim is reported to be a young man of Moroccan descent. The gunmen allegedly searched the building, witnesses said, until they found their intended target.
Police say the shooting was not a terrorist incident. Dutch daily, De Telegraaf quoted police as saying: “It seems to be a criminal matter.”
It is the second deadly shooting incident in two months in the neighbourhood.
In November, a 19-year-old boy was shot dead at the Kattenburgerkade. That incident happened only a few hundred meters away.
Meanwhile, the EU’s Migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told AFP that the mass movement of migrants from the third world was “directly linked to the principles and values on which Europe is based”.
He reiterated his commitment to establish legal channels to enable mass migration, giving special thanks to senior Labour MEP Claude Moraes — an open borders campaigner listed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations as a “reliable ally”, who as early as 2007 discussed with The Guardian his determination to combat “whiteness” in Brussels.