Last Friday, the police, fire brigade and ambulance personnel searched for nothing for a man who would have been pushed from a bicycle bridge into the Wilhelmina Canal in Tilburg. Now it turns out that the story was fabricated from start to finish. “One of the fathers had spoken insistently with his daughter. Then the true story came out,” says police spokesman Willem van Hooijdonk.
At the end of the morning on Friday, the police received the report in question. Two playing children had ‘seen’ that someone had been pushed into the water from the bicycle bridge on the Voldijk. On Monday it was announced that two eleven-year-old girls had called the emergency number 112 with a fabricated story.
Emergency services rushed into action on Friday. For example, a Burgernet report was sent to look out for a man on a yellow scooter. He was allegedly involved in the incident. Subsequently, a major search operation was rigged by the emergency services to look for the ‘victim’. Divers from the fire brigade, a sonar boat and a police helicopter were deployed.
Van Hooijdonk: “Shipping traffic and pumping station were also shut down. We spent a few hours here and that cost a lot of money. Moreover, they are also lost hours that we could have used elsewhere.”
Unnecessarily looking
According to the spokesman, the police received a call from one of the fathers on Sunday evening. The story of his daughter and another girl (both eleven years old) turned out to be fabricated. “Both girls are not yet twelve years old and therefore cannot be punished. The costs for the emergency services cannot be recovered from the parents. We will of course still talk to the children and their parents.”
Van Hooijdonk thinks that the girls have not considered the consequences of their action. “Maybe they wanted to play a joke, but this is not a nice joke. The emergency services were diligently looking for a missing person in the water for a long time.”
No reference HALT
Due to their young age, the girls could not be referred to Bureau HALT. Young people aged twelve to eighteen are referred to this in such cases. According to a spokesman for HALT, the young people then receive a teaching assignment, in which they must account for their behavior and consider how they came to their act.
They also have to have an apology conversation with a victim. “In this case, for example, that could have been an officer or a firefighter,” says the spokesperson.