Ex-Pupil Arrested Over School Shooting Threat

Dutch police have made an arrest in connection with a shooting threat that led to the closure of middle schools in the city of Leiden.

Armed officers were deployed to schools on Monday after the threat to "shoot my Dutch teacher and as many students as I can" was posted in English on online forum 4chan.org.

It added: "It's at a school in the Dutch city of Leiden. For more proof, I will be using a 9mm Colt Defender.

"Oh, and I'm using a proxy, the police is not gonna find me before tomorrow."

Police arrested a former pupil from the British School in the Netherlands (BSN) following the threat, news agency AFP reported.

A statement from the school said: "We have been informed that a former student of the British School in the Netherlands has been arrested in connection to threats made against a Dutch school in Leiden."

BSN added the pupil concerned was expelled in October 2011 "after incidents regarding his behaviour and has therefore not attended the school for over a year".

Pupils and their parents were warned to stay at home, but the school said there was never a threat to it or its students and it remained open on Monday.

Middle schools in the Netherlands cover the 12 to 16 age group. In Leiden there are at least 22, some of them international.

The city, which is home to the country's oldest university, lies just northeast of The Hague.

In April 2011, a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed six people and injured at least 10 others when he opened fire on shoppers in a shopping centre in the nearby town of Alphen aan de Rijn.

The gunman, 24-year-old Tristan van der Vlis, then killed himself.