LONDON — 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’s views.
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