The police in The Hague said on Tuesday that they had arrested three people in connection with an explosion at an apartment building in the Dutch city over the weekend that killed at least six people.
The explosion, which happened at 6:15 a.m. on Saturday, caused a fire and the partial collapse of a three-story block of apartments, according to fire officials. Four people with injuries were taken to a hospital. One person was treated on site.
Jan van Zanen, the mayor of The Hague, called it “an unprecedented disaster” in public remarks.
Rescue workers pulled a sixth body from the rubble in the early hours of Monday morning, and have since ended their search, fire officials in The Hague said.
Much about the explosion is still unknown. Officials have confiscated several cars, but they do not know what caused the blast or who was behind it.
The blast damaged 19 apartment duplexes, including five that were rendered completely uninhabitable, according to the fire officials.
The three people in custody are not allowed to have contact with the outside world, except for with their lawyer, the police said in a statement, adding that more arrests could follow.
After the explosion on Saturday, the police were looking for a car that was seen speeding from the scene. It was not clear if that vehicle was among the confiscated cars.
Smaller explosions near homes or businesses are not uncommon in big cities in the Netherlands, such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. The police believe that many such explosions are linked to drug trafficking or extortion.
Since 2021, the number of explosions in the Netherlands has increased significantly. There were 1,017 explosions last year, compared to a total of just 212 in 2021, according to police data. A vast majority happened in major cities.
But Saturday’s blast was of a different scale. The Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, visited the site over the weekend and said he was in shock.
“This is beyond imaginationmega dice,” he told reporters.