The man found dead in a plastic wheelie bin in Edam on Sunday was not the victim of a crime, police say.

The body is that of a 39-year-old man from Muntendam, a village in Groningen province, who was known to live on the streets, a police spokeswoman told broadcaster NOS.

Police do not yet know how the body ended up in the rubbish container, which was kept in the courtyard of the local waterboard’s conference centre. ‘It might have been an accident but our job is to establish if it was a crime, and it was not,’ the police spokeswoman said.

The Dutch forensic institute is now trying to establish how the man died. Local paper Noord Hollands Dagblad reports that one leg was sticking out of the container when the body was found at around 11.30 am on Sunday.