Qualla: 1977 Dutch Train Hijacking

1977 Dutch Train Hijacking: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elgaard, CC BY-SA 3.0. It was a Monday morning, just after nine. The train from Assen to Groningen, pulling its weekday load of commuters, students and shoppers, crossed a stretch of flat farmland near the village of De Punt when someone pulled the emergency brake. Nine young men, all of them Dutch citizens born to Moluccan families, stood up with automatic weapons and announced that the carriages now belonged to the Republic of South Maluku. Behind covered windows, in the heat of a Drenthe spring, fifty-four passengers would spend the next twenty days listening to negotiations they could not hear and waiting for a resolution no one knew how to reach.

Image: Elgaard | CC BY-SA 3.0

1977 Dutch Train Hijacking: The Quarrel That Started in Java

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. To understand the train, you have to start with a colonial army that no longer existed. The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army was disbanded on 26 July 1950 after Indonesian independence, but its Moluccan soldiers, who had fought on the Dutch side, were considered loyalists by th...

Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

1977 Dutch Train Hijacking: Twenty Days at the Edge of a Field

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Peters for Anefo . Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief: Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Fotopersbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 - negatiefstroken zwart/wit, nummer toegang 2.24.01.05, bestanddeelnummer 929-2101, CC0. About forty passengers, including the train crew, were released in the first hours. The remaining fifty-four were forced to help paper over the windows so that no one outside could see in. Warning shots were fired to encourage compliance. Twenty kilometers away, a parallel cell o...

Image: Hans Peters for Anefo . Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief: Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Fotopersbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 - negatiefstroken zwart/wit, nummer toegang 2.24.01.05, bestanddeelnummer 929-2101 | CC0

1977 Dutch Train Hijacking: The Assault

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Peters for Anefo . Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief: Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Fotopersbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 - negatiefstroken zwart/wit, nummer toegang 2.24.01.05, bestanddeelnummer 929-2101, CC0. On the morning of 11 June, six Lockheed F-104 Starfighter jets thundered over De Punt at low altitude while demolition charges went off near the train. The noise was meant to disorient the hijackers in the seconds before Dutch marines, drawn from the secret counter-terror unit la...

1977 Dutch Train Hijacking: Wounds That Outlived the Day

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Peters for Anefo . Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief: Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Fotopersbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 - negatiefstroken zwart/wit, nummer toegang 2.24.01.05, bestanddeelnummer 929-2101, CC0. The deaths did not end the story. In 2007 around six hundred people attended a memorial for the dead hijackers, an event that itself stirred old arguments. In 2013 the journalist Jan Beckers and the former hijacker Junus Ririmasse argued that three, and possibly four, of the dead...

1977 Dutch Train Hijacking: Standing at De Punt

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Peters for Anefo . Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief: Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Fotopersbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 - negatiefstroken zwart/wit, nummer toegang 2.24.01.05, bestanddeelnummer 929-2101, CC0. Today the spot is unmarked by anything dramatic. Trains still pass on the same line between Assen and Groningen, slowing as they curve through a meadow where, for three weeks in the spring of 1977, the country could speak of almost nothing else. The Moluccan community remains a q...