Theo van Gogh, the Dutch artist’s great grand-nephew and a provocative filmmaker, was shot dead in a street in Amsterdam on Tuesday, police said, apparently because of a film he made about Islamic violence against women.
Van Gogh (47) was stabbed and then shot several times by a man who witnesses said arrived on a bicycle as the film-maker was getting out of his car in the Linnaeusstraat, in the east of the city, at 8.45am, a police spokesperson, Elly Florax, said. He was dead by the time ambulances arrived.
The suspected killer, a 26-year-old man with dual Dutch and Moroccan nationality, fled into the nearby Oosterpark and was later arrested after a gunfight with police that left an officer and a bystander wounded. The man was last night under police guard in hospital, being treated for gunshot wounds to the leg.
The Dutch justice minister, Piet Hein Donner, said the suspect ”acted out of radical Islamic fundamentalist convictions”, and added that he had contacts with a group under surveillance by the Dutch secret service, AP reported.
As the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, appealed for calm, more than 10 000 people poured into Amsterdam’s central square in an emotional demonstration of support for Van Gogh and against violence.
”We won’t gather for a moment of silence, but to say loud and clear: freedom of expression is dear to us, and it must continue,” the city’s mayor, Job Cohen, said.
The Amsterdam public prosecutor said the suspect had left a letter on Van Gogh’s body, but declined to reveal its content until technical and forensic tests had been completed.
Van Gogh had recently drawn fierce criticism and received death threats for his latest fictional drama, Submission, in which a Muslim woman is forced into an arranged marriage, abused by her husband, raped by her uncle and then brutally punished for adultery.
The film, shown on Dutch television, was scripted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee given Dutch citizenship after fleeing an arranged marriage 12 years ago. Now a rightwing MP, Ms Hirsi Ali has renounced her faith for its treatment of women and offended many Muslim groups.
In the Netherlands there are around one million Muslims in a population of 16 million. Immigration, integration and Islam are all emotive issues.
Balkenende said: ”Nothing is known about the motive. The facts must first be carefully weighed. Let’s allow the investigators to do their jobs.”
He praised Van Gogh as a proponent of free speech who had ”outspoken opinions”, but said it would be ”unacceptable if a difference of opinion led to this brutal murder”.
Born in Wassenaar, a suburb of The Hague, Van Gogh — who throughout his life courted controversy with ill-concealed joy — arrived in Amsterdam at the age of 17 to attend film school, but the two shorts he submitted were rejected and he was advised to seek psychiatric help. None the less, in 25 years he made 10 original and intelligent feature-length films.
Van Gogh was employed at one time or another by every leading Dutch newspaper and magazine; almost all fired him for offending their readers’ sensibilities. But in the course of several hundred TV shows, Van Gogh also showed himself to be a sensitive and self-effacing interviewer.
”Two people inhabited him,” his actor friend Cas Enklar said. ”A courteous and adorable gentleman, and a devil who liked nothing better than making enemies.”
Van Gogh’s last film, about the life of the gay anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002, was due to have its premiere in January. – Guardian Unlimited Â