AMSTERDAM — Den Bosch Court sentenced on Wednesday five teenage boys to community work orders and suspended jail terms for arson attacks at an Islamic school and mosque in Uden last year.
The Bedir primary school was completely destroyed when it was torched on 9 November last year, while the arson attack at the mosque three days earlier failed to set fire to the building. A makeshift fire bomb was used in both attacks and police arrested several VMBO pre-vocational high school students on 20 November.
The two oldest suspects, 16 and 17, were convicted of the attempted arson attack at the mosque. Three suspects – aged 14, 15 and 16 – set fire to the school. The attack at the school was condemned nation-wide.
Both crimes were part of a series of retaliatory attacks against Islamic targets in the days after the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected Islamic militant on 2 November 2004.