Taliban says killed Dutch soldiers over film

Sun Apr 20, 2008 4:43pm EDT
 
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LONDON (Reuters) - The Taliban said a deadly attack on Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan was in retaliation for an anti-Islamic film made by a politician from the Netherlands, a U.S. terrorism monitoring service said on Sunday.

The son of the new chief of the Dutch military and another Dutch soldier serving with NATO-led forces were killed when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on Friday.

The attack was one of "a sequence of missions taking revenge for the insulting film", the Taliban said in a message in Arabic on its website, according to the terrorism monitoring service of a U.S. author and analyst who goes by the pseudonym Laura Mansfield.

Dutch MP Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigration Freedom Party, launched the anti-Koran film "Fitna" -- an Arabic term that can mean strife -- on the Internet last month.

The film urges Muslims to tear out "hate filled" verses from the Koran, and includes a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb under his turban.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende has repeatedly said that the government rejects Wilders' views.

(Writing by Keith Weir, editing by Ralph Boulton)

 

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