BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Police in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam detained a man on Wednesday after he was found driving a van with a Spanish license plate and carrying gas tanks near a venue where a concert by a U.S. band was canceled due to an attack threat.
The van was halted between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. local time (1900 GMT and 2000 GMT) in Mijnsherenlaan Street. Its driver, possible a spaniard, has been arrested for questioning. The van was examined and declared safe though.
Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb said at a hastily prepared press conference that the van was running suspiciously from one way to another near the Maassilo concert hall, where a concert by Los Angeles band Allah-Las was canceled earlier Wednesday due to a terror threat.
The venue, a former grain silo, was evacuated shortly after 7:00 p.m. (1700 GMT). A team of the Dutch Special Intervention Service was present in case of emergency.
The mayor said "it is too early to draw conclusions" whether there is any link between the van and the terror threat.
Aboutaleb on Wednesday afternoon received the terror warning from the Spanish police who are on extra alert after recent twin attacks that claimed 15 lives.
According to Aboutaleb, the message was that a terrorist attack was planned during the concert, and that it was serious enough to cancel the event.
British newspaper The Guardian reported earlier this month that the four-piece rock band received hate emails from people who are offended by its name, which included the Arabic word for God.
In an interview with the newspaper, the band has said they chose the word "Allah" because they were seeking a "holy sounding" name and is not intended as an insult.
Meanwhile, it is reported that the event is not connected to the attacks in Spain last week. A Spanish counterterrorism official was quoted as saying that investigators have dismissed any possible link after questioning the driver and examining the van.
The terrorist threat level in the Netherlands remains on "substantial" lever 4 on a scale of 5, according to the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, which means the chance of an attack is real but there are no specific indications of any preparation to carry out an attack.
Across Europe, security has been on high alert following the twin attacks in Spain's Catalonia and the knife attack in Finland's Turku where two women were killed and eight others were wounded, while France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Britain yet to recover from a number of bloody attacks since 2015.
Although European countries have strengthened the fight against terrorism, the momentum of terror attacks has not diminished.
"At the moment, there's an attack every four to six weeks in Europe," Frederic Gallois, the former chief of a French security force, has said.
International terror groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State (IS) deliberately targeted "soft targets" in Europe, or public space with large concentrations of people, as part of their strategy, he added.
Due to its participation in the U.S. interventions in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, Europe has become the target of terrorist groups' revenge.
EU security commissioner Julian King has warned the returning of extremist foreign fighters from conflict zone as the IS lost territories there, saying this poses a very serious threat to European states.
