Amsterdam police clear area around central metro station

THE HAGUE: Police in Amsterdam said on Sunday that they had cleared the area around the central Rokin metro station and that explosives experts were on the scene investigating.

Amsterdam police wrote about the operation in a post on social media network X but gave no more details about what had caused them to clear the area.

Rokin metro station is in the very centre of the city, close to the Dam square and the main shopping street.

The Netherlands has seen a series of terror attacks and plots but not on the scale of other European countries, such as France or Britain.

In 2019, the country was stunned by a shooting spree on a tram in the city of Utrecht that claimed four lives.

In the most serious incident involving a terror attack, outspoken Dutch anti-Islam film director Theo van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death in 2004 in Amsterdam by a man with ties to a Dutch Islamist terror network.