Maverick Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn was shot dead on Monday, nine days before a general election in which he was expected to make big gains.
Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok said yesterday a general election would go ahead as planned on May 15, heeding a call by shocked supporters of slain rightist politician Pim Fortuyn.
PHOTO: AFP
Kok broke off a campaign engagement after the assassination.
``Respect for each other means you fight with words, not bullets. What has happened here is indescribable,'' Kok said in an interview. "I am broken."
Fortuyn, 54, bidding to be his country's first gay prime minister, was assassinated by a lone gunman after giving a radio interview in the town of Hilversum, near Amsterdam.
Fortuyn, an anti-immigration standard bearer, suffered at least five gunshot wounds to his forehead, back and neck, chief public prosecutor Theo Hofstee said.
Photos were splashed across all national newspapers showing a lifeless Fortuyn lying on the ground at the Hilversum media center, a blood-soaked bandage around his trademark shaven head and with eyes shut and mouth wide open.
"It is painfully clear that this is an attack on the very soul of democracy. When free speech is buried in a hail of bullets, that's the end," daily Trouw wrote in an
editorial.
The suspected killer, a 32-year-old "white Dutchman" from Harderwijk, in the Netherlands' staunchly religious "Bible belt," had environmentalist material and ammunition at his home, prosecutors said. But he has made no statement and the motive for the killing remained unclear, they added.
Some newspapers said he was known to intelligence services as an "extreme leftist," but Hofstee said: "We do not use that term."
Fortuyn party supporters insisted the general election should go ahead as planned despite the killing. Storming into the political limelight just two months ago, polls showed Fortuyn's party could capture some 15 percent of the vote.
"Pim loved electoral democracy, so we too want the elections to go ahead on May 15," Fortuyn party spokesman Mat Herben said.
Mourners continued to lay wreaths at the spot where Fortuyn was shot and in the port city of Rotterdam, his home base, people queued to sign a condolences book.
"I think he was shot down for nothing. He was shot down for his belief," said food inspector Tom Kursten, 20.
Many argued that pidgeon holing Pim as simply "right-wing" was an oversimplification.
"Pim was not an extremist. He wanted to do something for the working class to save us from taxes and do something for the normal people and not for the immigrants," said one protester outside parliament, Leslie Gonggeyp, a truck driver.
In his last radio interview, recorded just before he was gunned down, Fortuyn was asked how old he would like to grow.
"When I was 14 or so, I thought: I'll live to be 86 or 87. And that feeling has never gone away," media quoted Fortuyn as telling the interviewer.
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