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He was heard afterwards boasting to another suspect whose phone had been tapped that he had removed apparently incriminating documents before the raid. Bouyeri’s own phone was tapped from July until October 21. Thirteen days later, wearing a jacket several sizes too large, he hunted down his victim with two butcher’s knives and a pistol.

Since the early 1950s, when thousands of people from the former Dutch colony of Indonesia moved to the Indian quarter of Amsterdam where van Gogh was killed, the district has been at the heart of a multicultural experiment now deemed to have failed.

The willingness of the Dutch to welcome immigrants has been under growing strain since the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Turks and Moroccans in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unlike their predecessors, they did not speak Dutch and appeared less able — or willing — to integrate, living increasingly in separate communities.

Tensions came to a head two years ago with the rise of Pim Fortuyn, a rightwinger assassinated on the eve of elections that turned his followers into a powerful political force.

Although Fortuyn’s party faded after his death, Balkenende’s government has taken a strict line on immigration and has begun deporting 26,000 rejected asylum seekers.

During a heated debate in parliament last week there were calls to go further by shutting radical mosques, forcing all imams to have lessons in the Dutch language and culture and making it easier to close down websites inciting racial hatred.

The popular mood has continued to shift sharply against immigrants amid anxiety expressed by Frits Bolkestein, the outgoing Dutch European commissioner, that Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht will have non-European majorities within two generations.

Mohammed, he noted, was already the most common first name registered in Amsterdam.

Even older Dutch citizens, once the most tolerant, now favour radical change. “It doesn’t surprise me that youngsters are going out attacking mosques,” said a newsagent in the street where van Gogh died.

Cino Karakik, 19, a Turk whose family owns the bakery across the street, has watched a stream of people arriving to lay wreaths. “They look at me as if to say, ‘Yeah, he’s one of them’,” said Karakik. “People are looking to make trouble.”

Such tensions are valuable to politicians vying for Fortuyn’s mantle. Among them is Geert Wilders, a right-wing MP whose popularity has soared since the secret service revealed that he was on an Islamic extremists’ death list.

Guarded by armed police, he is now campaigning for an end to immigration and has drawn up a list of 200 Islamic extremists to be deported or incarcerated. “We can’t just leave it to the intelligence services to play this impossible game of trying to get every single piece of evidence needed for a judge to put them behind bars,” he said.

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