The Dutch state does not have to pay damages to the relatives of two men shot dead by marines during the Moluccan train hijack in 1977, the appeal court said on Tuesday.

The court upheld a 2018 lower court ruling which said the marines did not act unlawfully by shooting two of the hostage takers. Six of the nine activists were killed when the marines stormed the train after a stand-off.

Advocaat Liesbeth Zegveld argued that the two were executed when they were already severely wounded and not capable of offensive action. In total, some 15,000 rounds of ammunition were fired at the train and the marines should have assumed that the two no longer posed any danger, Zegveld said.

But the court ruled that the marines had to take decisions in the heat of the moment and in an extremely threatening situation.

Zegveld said after the verdict that she was disappointed and surprised. ‘The way the marines acted has not been properly examined and that is carte blanche to kill,’ she told reporters.

There were a number of violent incidents in the Netherlands in the 1970s involving radicalised young Moluccans.

At the same time as the train hostage taking at De Punt in Groningen, another group took a number of school children and their teachers hostage in a school in Bovensmilde. In this case the hostage takers surrendered and no one was hurt.

Frustrations

The frustration of many in the Moluccan community goes back to the way the post-war government treated the soldiers who had fought for the Dutch in its former colony of Indonesia and who, when Indonesia proclaimed its independence, looked to the Dutch state to help them in their efforts to establish their own independent Moluccan state.

In 1951 some 12,500 Moluccan soldiers and their families were shipped to the Netherlands and housed in barracks, as a temporary measure. They were then discharged from the army, not allowed to work and given pocket money.

The Dutch government, however, never made any effort to help the Moluccans establish their Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS) which the Indonesian government refuses to recognise it to this day.