The 25-year-old man arrested for stabbing an 18-year-old youth to death in the Brabant town of Oss this weekend is a Sudanese refugee who is known to the police as a troublemaker, the Telegraaf said on Wednesday.

Rik van de Rakt was found dead next to his bike on Sunday morning in what police said appeared to be a random attack. They have since arrested the refugee, and eyewitnesses say he may have been involved in another incident earlier in the day.

He was in a ‘confused state’ when he was picked up at Oss railway station, the Telegraaf said.

Both the victim and the refugee live in the nearby town of Heesch. The village hit the headlines four years ago when locals protesting at plans to set up a refugee centre for 500 people hung two dead pigs from a tree at the proposed location.

The refugee centre was never built.

The Oss attack is not the first to involve refugees who may have mental health problems. In May 2018, a Syrian man stabbed three people in the street in The Hague in an apparently random attack. In 2019,  he was sentenced to an indefinite term in a secure psychiatric unit.