Police Motor Pool Firebombed by Dutch Anarchist Group, Revolutionary Resistance

Militant anarchists in the Netherlands have claimed the July 15th attack targeting a police motor pool with an improvised incendiary device/explosive device (IID/IED) in the small Dutch town of Gemert. The detonation of the device and the ensuing conflagration destroyed at least one police squad car and seriously damaged two others. The burning vehicles were discovered around 4 a.m. and extinguished.

The attack was claimed by a group calling themselves Revolutionary Resistance (RR). They appeared earlier this summer in Amsterdam, claiming the detonation of another small IED in the parking lot of an immigration police station on June 2nd. They described the device as a “timer bomb.”  RR stated that the Amsterdam attack was a “solidarity action to return violence back to the state,” adding that it was “an answer to the police violence against working class during the Covid-19 pandemic.” According to that claim, it was RR’s third direct action.  

RR’s claim of the recent Gemert attack states:

On July 15 around 3:30AM we used a bomb against police cars in Gemert. We are oppressed but we don't victimize ourselves, we act from the position of power against the state's repression. In this neoliberal world, there is no safety for proletariat. So let's take away the safety from the state as well, in the big cities and small villages.

We do this in solidarity with undocumented proletariat who are holding the hunger strike in Brussels, Belgium. As an armed hand of working class, we have a duty to return the violence to the state. The undocumented proletariat in Brussels must receive legal papers. We call our movement to express more public solidarity with them.

The “undocumented proletariat” mentioned here refers to over 200 immigrants on hunger strike in the Belgian capital since May 23rd, protesting their immigration status and impending deportations. The hunger strike is taking place in a sympathetic church and two university buildings. Some of the immigrants have lived in the country for over a decade, and the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights has expressed his alarm at the situation.