Dutch Police Arrest Suspected Gunman In Utrecht Shooting That Left 3 Dead

The gunman being sought in connection to a shooting in the Dutch city of Utrecht that left three people dead and five injured was arrested hours after the shooting, police said Monday.

Dutch police had been searching for 37-year-old Gokmen Tanis, who was born in Turkey, in connection with the possible terrorist attack, reported BBC.

Dutch authorities had raised the threat alert to the highest level in Utrecht and surrounding areas before the suspect was found, reported NBC News.

Utrecht’s mayor, Jan van Zanen, called Tanis a suspect and said three of the injured have serious wounds.

“We are working on the assumption of a terrorist motive,” van Zanen said. “We think there is just one perpetrator, but we cannot exclude the possibly of there being several perpetrators.”

All mosques in Utrecht were evacuated by authorities and security was upped at other mosques around the Netherlands, reported The New York Times. Authorities did not say whether the evacuations were due to a specific threat or were done to be extra careful after the deadly mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday.

Utrecht is a city of about 330,000 people located 25 miles from the Netherlands’ capital, Amsterdam.

The Netherlands had a rocky 2018, during which seven men were arrested for conspiring to commit a major terrorist attack in the country and an Afghan man stabbed two Americansin a railway station.