The immigrant did not make a confused impression on Saturday, contrary to official statements. That is what Ali noted, owner of the café Nova where the stabbing started.
“The man is not a customer of ours. He sat quietly on a communal bench by the door, near the water,” Ali explained. “Until he got up and walked a few meters towards us. There was a young boy just drinking something and this man started to stab him. It was awful. But what was so crazy was that he remained dead calm, the perpetrator. We helped the boy right away because he was bleeding a lot.”
According to Ali, the man remained calm throughout. “Some of us went after him and called out to passersby: ‘Stay away from him, stay away from that man!’ So that someone would not be stabbed. Yet he stabbed two more people. And he kept on walking calmly, quietly.
“He was not confused. I read that, but it does not seem like the truth to me.”
According to the police, the victims remain in a serious condition, but no longer critical. The victims were at three different locations, some hundred meters from each other.
The perpetrator walked around calmly before he was eventually shot and arrested by the police. On films from bystanders, he called “Allahu Akbar” during his arrest.
An eyewitness passing by, quite coincidentally right behind the 31-year-old perpetrator, also said that the stabber seemed calm. “He walked quietly, with that knife in his left hand. Then the man stabbed two people,” the witness said. “I thought: he already had his fight. He had a fight in that lounge down there, where they were busy with that victim. I didn’t know he was going to stab two more people. Until he suddenly attacked someone with a bicycle at the Consumentenbond.”
The attacker was known to emergency services. From his home in the center of the city, he had yelled from his window and had thrown his belongings out onto the street during an earlier incident.
That is what insiders say. Because he had thrown chairs, a mattress and other things onto the street, trams could not pass in the street for some time. The police closed the area around the house and the tram traffic had to be diverted.
After a mediator of the police intervened, the Syrian surrendered. Then he was taken to a special shelter for special-needs persons and the street was cleaned up.
The suspect was arrested yesterday after stabbing three people.
Dutch police have said that the fact that the man was known as “confused” before, does not automatically mean that he was confused at the time of the stabbing. “That is all being investigated,” a spokeswoman said. The police are also investigating all of his statements recorded on camera images. All options, including a terrorist motive, will be examined, they added.
But city authorities have not issued additional statements on the stabber’s mental state.