A trainee teacher is shot dead on a street corner in Amsterdam and the police immediately talk about a ‘liquidation’ – the Dutch word for a gangland killing.

The teacher in question was not called Jan Smit, but Hassan Ait Khouda – or Hassan A as the Volkskrant calls him, making him even more suspect.
A, the paper tells us, was known to the police and had a criminal record. He was also 28, in his final year of teacher training and extremely popular with his pupils and colleagues. But those facts are obviously less relevant to his murder.
Then we’ve got defence minister Eimert van Middelkoop who has taken a verbal drubbing for admitting he was pleased to have avoided military service in the 1970s.
Does this somehow make him less qualified to head up the defence department? Can you have an education minister who hated school?
In the 1970s everyone tried to get out of military service – schools gave advice to 18-year-old youths on how to pretend to be gay or psychotic so they would not have to serve. And if you had a job that made you unmissable like Middelkoop did, good luck to you. Your peers are just jealous.
MPs appear to have forgiven Van Middelkoop for his honesty after he wrote them a letter saying he was sorry. Unfortunately for Hassan Ait Khouda, the dead cannot talk back.