An eight-year-old boy has been stabbed to death by a masked man at a primary school in the Netherlands.
A 22-year-old man has been arrested as a suspect in the killing of Jesse Dingemans, police said.

The attacker was not related to the boy, the son of a local bank manager, and the motive for the attack was not clear, police said.

The attack took place in the town of Hoogerheide, 150km (90miles) south of Amsterdam, near the Belgian border.

"The killer fled but police have now arrested a suspect," said police spokesman Willem van Hooijdonk.

"It does not seem that many children witnessed the incident," he told Dutch broadcaster NOS.

"As far as we can reconstruct it did not happen in front of a full classroom."

The boy is believed to have been stabbed when he went to an empty classroom to retrieve something.

The school was evacuated after the incident, while a helicopter hovered overhead. No murder weapon has been found.

The BBC's correspondent in The Hague, Geraldine Coughlan, said the killing has shocked the Netherlands.

School killings are rare in the country, which has strict laws on possession of weapons.

The Dutch Education Minister has said schools must be a secure environment for children.

A Dutch teacher was shot dead by a student and another seriously injured in a stabbing two years ago.

Source

The story doesn't tell everything, the masked man didn't just stab the child, apparently he literally slit the boy's throat from ear to ear. Every time i think i've seen the worst of it all, along comes another twisted bastard to let me know i have seen nothing yet. The brutality of this murder is beyond all imagination.

[ 12-01-2006, 07:02 PM: Message edited by: johnny ]

My question is how did a grown man get into an elementary school completely unchallenged by any of the staff? Didn't any of them wonder who this guy was?

There are no security guards or anything here, up until now that was never really necessary. And since everyone was attending class, i guess he could slip into the halways unnoticed, but you don't really have to sneak around either to enter such a school. The kid had to leave class to go pick something up in another room, so it's a classical case of being at the wrong spot at the wrong time. What i'd like to know is what the guy's intention were, because i don't think he was expecting that one kid in the halway, maybe he wanted to storm into a classroom and butcher as many as possible.

They captured him, so maybe he'll spill his guts.

If it's like around here, then no one will even notice anything weird until that someone starts behaving weird...

There seems to be a lot of attacks on schools and schoolkids around the world these days. Is it because of the headlines they generate? Some images of the Beslan Massacre in 2004 still haunt me.

*sigh*