As shock turns to a sense of furious revulsion across an entire country, there is one haunting little detail that stands out.
‘I keep thinking about that red handbag,’ wrote the Dutch poet Nienke’s Gravemade last week in a poem that has caught the national mood.
And she is right. I can’t get it out of my head either. Nor for that matter can the group of women of all ages – plus several men – whom I find at one of this week’s nationwide protests.
Most have dug out red bags of many shapes and sizes and are dangling them from their handlebars as they set off on a – thoroughly Dutch – show of solidarity and mourning for a girl known to the entire Netherlands only as ‘Lisa’.
She was the talented, popular, hockey-mad, tennis-loving, vivacious 17-year-old who had just left school and was embracing life as a grown-up – handbag and all – until she cycled back from a night out with friends ten days ago.
Ten minutes from home, she was stabbed to death. In their quest for eyewitnesses who might offer clues to Lisa’s final journey, Dutch police issued a detailed description of her appearance – right down to her ‘medium length blonde hair’, Adidas footwear and the ‘red handbag on the handlebars of her bicycle’.
What has elevated this story from a tragedy to a political earthquake is that the man in custody on suspicion of her murder is an asylum seeker. He was arrested for a rape in Amsterdam but police quickly connected him to Lisa’s murder.
He had been living at a hostel for 800 migrants barely a mile away from her home. It has since transpired he was wanted for at least one other sexual assault in the Amsterdam area, while more women are coming forward to report close escapes.
On top of this comes the astonishing revelation that the authorities cannot confirm the man’s identity even though a hostel spokesman confirmed to me that the 22-year-old suspect was a registered resident there.
In other words, he was in the system, in receipt of €70 per week in state benefits – and yet the state still has no idea who he is.
Little wonder that, even in this most progressive of European democracies, it is not just the Dutch hard-Right who are calling time on Europe’s sclerotic and collapsing asylum system.
Across the continent, both within and without the EU, from Epping to the Swiss Alps to the Elbe, a handful of horrific isolated incidents in tandem with extreme social and economic unease, have changed the political landscape entirely.
Ten years ago this very week, former German chancellor Angela Merkel threw open Europe’s frontiers to a surge of migration on the back of the Syrian civil war, with her bright-eyed message of ‘we can do it’. However noble her intention at the time, the pan-European retort is now a very different one: ‘No, we can’t.’
Previously heretical warnings about the threat of mass migration to traditional cultures, largely confined to hard-Right movements such as Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally and the Party for Freedom of veteran Dutch maverick Geert Wilders, have since become part of mainstream political discourse.
In Britain, even Sir Keir Starmer has warned of an ‘island of strangers’ (before saying he didn’t mean it), while it is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK that is making the running in the current polls.
Here in Holland, the coalition government has recently imploded, chiefly on the issue of immigration. An emergency election takes place in about eight weeks, with Wilders’s party – already the largest in parliament with a quarter of the seats – tipped to extend its reach.
Lisa’s death has also opened up an even broader debate on the lack of safety for women in a modern, so-called civilised society. Even the most progressive Dutch liberals, while insisting this murder should not be linked to migration, are demanding a cultural sea change in the treatment of young women.
As well as the adoption of the red handbag as a symbol of defiance, Lisa has inspired a ‘Me Too’-style battle cry: ‘We Claim The Night.’ An appeal for crowd-funding has raised over half a million euros in just a few days, paying for huge displays and ads with a simple message: why should women have to walk the streets in fear of male aggression?
For this murder is one of those atrocities that touches the general public so profoundly that calls for change can no longer be ignored.
Here in Holland, I sense echoes of both the Southport killings and the alleged sexual assaults near the migrant hotel in Epping, but also the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021.
Her death, of course, had nothing to do with race whatsoever. Sarah was killed by a white British monster with a Metropolitan Police badge. However, the loss of a bright, vivacious young woman to the savagery of a stranger appalled the entire country to such an extent that the public took to the streets in vast numbers to demand a paradigm shift in public attitudes, including those of the authorities themselves.
That is certainly how it feels here in Holland.
The ghastliness of Lisa’s murder is exacerbated by circumstances that might have sprung from a film or gruesome television drama. The more you examine this story, the more distressing it becomes.
Lisa had been out with friends in Amsterdam’s centre into the early hours of August 20. Having travelled there on her electric bike, she could have returned with her friends but did not want to risk leaving her Cowboy E-bike (around £2,200 new) in the city overnight, so set off home on a journey she knew well.
It’s nine miles from the clubs and bars of Leidseplein to the village of Abcoude, but that is no distance in cycling-obsessed Holland. Along flat roads with street-lighting, half the journey was Lisa’s school route until a few weeks ago.
Somewhere along the home stretch, she realised she was being followed and called the police. By the time they reached the location of the call at around 4.15am, they found Lisa’s body in a ditch. She had been stabbed to death. CCTV cameras later showed a hooded prowler cycling around the same area shortly before her killing.
I arrive at the scene in bright sunshine, a patch of grass between a main road and a culvert. It is now laid out as a shrine, carpeted with flowers, and fresh bunches arrive every minute. People have come from all over the region. Some take one look at the tributes and crumple.
Eva Prins, 25, a hairdresser, is tying up a big sheet saying ‘LISA RIP’ and readily pins the blame on the asylum system. ‘There has to be more control of these people – 100 per cent,’ she says. ‘We can’t keep on welcoming people from cultures where women are not respected. How many more girls have to suffer?’
Truck driver Kevin Le Boer and his girlfriend, Linn Snoek, both 20, concur. ‘We have too many people coming into this country and they are from aggressive cultures,’ says Kevin.
Though there is great anger, it has not (yet) extended to protests outside the hostel where the suspect was living.
A seven-storey block on the edge of an industrial estate, its residents come and go, mostly on bikes, including some smart electric models (unlike in Britain, asylum seekers here are allowed to seek paid employment). Security staff stop me before I am halfway to the main door, so I watch a police boat dredging the adjacent canal. Earlier this week, their efforts brought a large knife to the surface, though police have made no comment on its significance.
Back at the murder scene, I meet plenty of people who remain adamant that Holland should not be turning its back on migrants. Interestingly, they tend to be older, whereas it is those in their 20s who take the toughest line.
‘I am here as a mother with a teenage daughter,’ says a woman called Olivia. ‘But as a black woman, as soon as I heard about this murder, I thought: ‘Please don’t let it be a migrant’.’ Born in the former Dutch colony Suriname, Olivia says she has seen a rise in racial tension fuelled by politicians, including Geert Wilders.
‘I knew what would happen. Wilders is now using Lisa’s murder to make trouble. We never heard him talking about the 70-year-old Amsterdam woman killed by her white husband last week.’
Since Lisa’s death, Wilders has declared that his party will implement ‘a complete asylum ban’ if elected in October’s poll.
Lisa was not a wild party girl. She was living the Dutch dream, playing and following sport (including the local football team, Ajax) and had summer jobs in two local restaurants to earn money for university. She was only cycling home because she was worried about her hard-earned E-bike.
Inevitably, some people ask why a 17-year-old was out on her own at 3am, though such discussions invite immediate accusations of victim blaming. That is to overlook the innate Dutchness of all this. Lisa was riding through a middle-class area of Europe’s most middle-class country to the middle-class home she shared with her mother, a marketing executive, her father, an IT executive, and her twin sister.
At the parents’ request, family names and details were not being released ahead of yesterday’s very private funeral. Last night they issued a statement saying: ‘We said goodbye to Lisa today with love, surrounded by our loved ones.’
Her home village of Abcoude is the quintessentially tidy, ordered, immaculate, canal-side collection of cobbled, gabled, red-brick, Dutch decency. Compounding the normality of it all is that this week marks the annual seven-day village festival, with concerts, a funfair and street parties.
After much soul-searching, the organisers have decided to keep the festival going but with an early finish each night and the cancellation of wilder ‘fun’ events such as the pole-climbing contest. I drop in on an oompah band recital. Everyone is doing their best to be jolly but the melancholy overhangs the aching determination to do the right thing. Most refuse to comment.
The growing pile of flowers at the local church has a ‘no photography’ sign tied to the barrier.
Scratch a little deeper, however, and views are as one might expect in a close-knit place where most people knew and loved Lisa and her family. ‘I certainly don’t blame all migrants but this will be a game-changer,’ says one man. A middle-aged mother tells me there is fury here ‘but people are waiting until after the funeral’.
There have been protests right across the Netherlands this week. Public buildings in Amsterdam were lit up in orange in memory of Lisa, not out of nationalist sentiment (though orange is the national colour) but because of the United Nations’ ‘Orange the World’ campaign against violence towards women.
In the village of Zoeterwoude, many miles from Abcoude, I find that mass protest with all the red handbags on handlebars.
One of the organisers, Annelise Smit, a 52-year-old civil servant and mother, says local women have long felt uncomfortable riding along the only cycle route from here to the nearby city of Leiden. So Lisa’s death has prompted the locals to ‘reclaim’ it.
‘We call it the ‘spook route’ and there have been several incidents of women being molested,’ she tells me. ‘But let’s not blame this on migrants. If you do that, you let all the violent Dutch men off the hook.’
Among those riding is receptionist Jacqueline van Leeuwen, 50, with her daughters aged 23 and 18. ‘It might sound odd for a Dutch person but I hate cycling with a passion. I haven’t been on a bike for 23 years!’ she laughs. ‘But Lisa’s story has touched us all. I always find it so stressful when my girls are out on their bikes.’
Back in central Amsterdam towards midnight, I find groups of young people in the same Leidseplein area where Lisa spent her last night. I talk to a group of teenage girls who are here to hear the British band, Only The Poets.
They are all clear-headed, impressively articulate (with perfect English), from diverse backgrounds and acutely aware that, however much they may want to ‘claim the night’, they have to be careful. ‘My mum almost didn’t let me come,’ says Mae, 17. ‘But we all know that you have to stick together.’
At the other end of the equation, meanwhile, the new arrivals keep stacking up. Many are now housed on ships and large accommodation barges, such as Amsterdam’s Bibby Progress (sister vessel to the disastrously expensive British-based Bibby Stockholm, which was shut down after endless health and legal problems).
I meet Khan, 20, and Mohammed, newly arrived from Afghanistan via Iran and Greece, and Syrians Ahmed, 27, and Hamdo, 30. As we speak, we are nearly run down by other asylum seekers riding souped-up electric bikes, which are stacked in the Bibby’s (very full) cycle park. ‘They have jobs so they can buy bikes,’ says Khan, a tad enviously.
All are friendly and commendably impatient to start working, as soon as they can complete the paperwork. ‘I can’t get a job because I am still waiting to hear from a case officer,’ says Ahmed crossly. The process is clearly now seen as a tedious formality rather than a sacred privilege.
Aside from one Syrian, Basel, 39, who pulls up his sleeve to reveal a shrapnel scar, none present a cast-iron asylum claim beyond ‘life not good at home’. Yet none of them has heard the tragic story of Lisa.
There are no easy answers to any of this. One thing, however, feels inescapable. The status quo of the past decade will be lucky to hold for another year.