A quick job for some cash. That's apparently how a teenager from Amsterdam saw it when he and another person turned up at BOEREJONGENS on Almere's Grote Markt on June 24, 2025. They placed bottles of fuel outside the coffeeshop and used powerful fireworks to set off an explosion. A fire broke out, the front door was wrecked and the large glass frontage was damaged. Firefighters had to be called in. Easy money? Maybe that's what he thought at the time. The judge has since handed him a rather different bill.
The boy, now 17, was sentenced to 80 hours of community service and 60 days of suspended juvenile detention, with a two-year probation period. He must also pay €17,861.83 in damages, plus interest and legal costs. In court, he admitted that someone else had paid him to carry out the attack. But he refused to say who ordered it or why the coffeeshop had been targeted. The judge took a particularly dim view of that silence. It means the people running BOEREJONGENS still don't know who's behind the attack on their business.
For the owners and staff, the trouble didn't end when the broken glass was cleared away. They feared another attack and even worried that the mayor might temporarily shut the shop down. There had already been another explosion at the coffeeshop a month earlier, although no connection between the two incidents has been established. BOEREJONGENS arranged extra security and took a €224,000 damages claim to court, most of it covering those security measures. The court, however, found there wasn't enough evidence to link all those expenses directly to this particular attack.
In the end, the judge awarded only the proven repair costs. The prosecution had asked for 150 hours of community service, but the court reduced that to 80, partly so the teenager could start earning money to pay back the damage sooner. The court also found insufficient proof that the explosion had put anyone's life at risk or created a danger of serious physical injury, although the surrounding buildings had clearly been endangered. One question still hangs over the whole affair: who pays a teenager to blow up a coffeeshop? The boy knows the answer, but he's keeping quiet. For the people left dealing with the damage and fear, that silence may be the hardest part to swallow.
