Fortuyn ‘killed to protect Muslims’

THE man who confessed to killing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn yesterday told a court he did it to protect the country’s Muslim minority from Fortuyn’s anti-immigration policies.

Volkert van der Graaf, a 33-year-old animal rights activist, was arrested moments after Fortuyn was gunned down in a car park outside a radio studio on May 6, 2002, just days before a general election.

At the start of his trial yesterday, he openly answered questions about the motives behind the first political assassination in modern Dutch history.