A court in the Netherlands has convicted a Dutch teenager of plotting terrorist attacks on the Flemish Parliament in Brussels and a military airbase near the Dutch city of Arnhem in 2024. The boy was just 12 years old at the time.
The boy, from the Dutch province of Friesland, ran a chat group on the communications app Telegram, through which he called on others to carry out terrorist attacks.
The boy offered one of the members of the group money to carry out a bomb attack on the Flemish Parliament in Brussels. No attack was carried out as the person inquestion backed out. There were also plans for an attack on the military airbase in the eastern Dutch city of Arnhem.
The court in Leeuwarden (Friesland) said that the boy has far-right sympathies and wished to create chaos in order to start “a race war and replace democracy with a white ethno-state”. It is not clear why he had planned an attack in Belgium.
The boy was given a 3-month suspended youth detention sentence with a probation period of 2 years. He will also have to receive treatment from the Dutch body that deals with people that become radicalised.