Amsterdam stabbing attack

On the afternoon of 27 March 2025, a man stabbed five people in the busy area around the Sint Nicolaasstraat near Dam Square in central Amsterdam, with emergency services alerted shortly after 3:15 pm. Police said the victims appeared to have been attacked at random. The wounded were a 69-year-old American man and a 67-year-old American woman, a 26-year-old Polish man, a 73-year-old Belgian woman, and a 19-year-old woman from Amsterdam. According to reporting by NL Times and DutchNews.nl, no one was killed, and the injured were hospitalised. Bystanders, including a British tourist, helped restrain the attacker until police arrived; the suspect was detained nearby with a leg injury.

The suspect, a 30-year-old Ukrainian man from the Donetsk region identified in Dutch media as Roman D., was found carrying multiple knives and several sets of false identity documents, which delayed confirmation of his identity. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (OM) formally placed him under suspicion of five counts of attempted murder or manslaughter with terrorist intent, arguing that the choice of a crowded, central location in daylight pointed to an intent to instill fear in the population. The motive, however, remained contested. The suspect declined to explain his actions, and his lawyer rejected any terrorist, ideological, religious or political motive, attributing the attack to a personal crisis possibly linked to a brain injury sustained during military service. As reported by NL Times, the motive remained officially unknown into late 2025.

Dutch prosecutors treated the attack as terrorism based on its planning and public setting, but the underlying motive was never firmly established, and the defence disputed any ideological aim, pointing to the suspect's mental state and a possible service-related brain injury. The available reporting does not link the incident to any foreign state or to organised hybrid or sabotage activity; the suspect's Ukrainian nationality and military background appear incidental rather than indicative of state direction. The case is best read as a contested, possibly individually-motivated mass stabbing rather than confirmed state-sponsored activity, pending the criminal proceedings.