Danny V., the man who attacked and threatened CDA MP Pieter Omtzigt during a demonstration, expressed regret on Wednesday at the police judge in The Hague. “It’s stupid. It just shouldn’t have happened,” said the 26-year-old suspect.
Images of the incident, which took place on August 20, were shown in court on Wednesday. It can be seen that the CDA member is followed by a group of demonstrators for minutes, while he says that he does not feel comfortable with it.
A man, now identified as V., at one point berates the Member of Parliament for “cancer dog” and “cancer monstrosity” and says he will kill him. “That is not so neat of course”, says Heerlen V. Wednesday during the handling of his case.
The man was under the influence of alcohol that day, but he does not remember exactly how many beers he had drunk. “It was more than one.”
Later that day he was arrested downtown for public intoxication. The man has posted videos about this on his Facebook, in which he scolded the officers for “typhoid rats”.
It is not the first time that V. is in court. He has been arrested several times for, among other things, public drunkenness, open violence and theft. He was sentenced to community service twice, one of which he carried out. When asked why he didn’t perform the other, V.’s answer was: “Don’t feel like it.”
Omtzigt felt threatened
The CDA member himself has stated that the man behaved physically intimidating, aggressive and agitated. “I did not rule out that he could attack me,” said Omtzigt’s statement.
He did not hear the verbatim threat at the time. He eventually escaped the assailants by entering the Treasury Department, where he had to recover for a while.
Arib: ‘An absolute shame’
Chamber president Khadija Arib reported the harassment and spoke of “an absolute disgrace”. Prime Minister Mark Rutte also condemned the behavior of the people, whom he called “rude and uneducated”.
The group demonstrated against the corona policy. That day, the demonstration also got out of hand at other locations and agents were attacked.
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