WHEN Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, collected his post from the letterbox on Wednesday he got an unpleasant surprise. Among the bills and junk mail was a letter addressing him as “ugly dog”. It told him he would soon be beheaded.

It was an unnerving way to start the day. Only 24 hours earlier Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker.

Now other people were being targeted, too, as evidence emerged of a “brigade” of Dutch jihadists preparing to murder “the enemies of Islam” in a terror campaign that would be easier to carry out than the bombing of trains or heavily guarded government buildings.

The carefully planned killing of van Gogh plunged into ferment the formerly peaceful “bicycling monarchy” where, in the good old days, a relaxed Queen Beatrix used to ride about without attracting any attention. It prompted some to rethink their faith in a multiracial society. Others predicted a bloodbath.

“Do not think you are safe,” said the letter to Wilders, who had been planning to set up a party to help to tackle the “Islamic problem” in Holland, “because we will catch you and cut off your ugly head.”

He was not the only one to be threatened. “There will be no mercy” said a document that the killer had held over van Gogh’s chest before skewering it there with a final knife blow to his heart.

By then van Gogh, 47, had been shot several times and was seen by one witness on his knees, pleading with his assailant, “Don’t do it . . . we can still talk about it.”

The response was a knife to the throat. The killer sawed through the neck and spinal column, almost to the point of decapitating him.

Unlike the murder two years ago of Pim Fortuyn, the right-wing populist, by an animal rights activist, the motive for such savagery seemed horrifically clear — to spread terror in Europe’s green and pleasant garden with a theatre of blood more reminiscent of the deserts of Iraq. It has succeeded.

Wilders has been taken into protective police custody along with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a liberal MP of Somali origin who also appeared on the list. Her offence was to call herself an ex-Muslim and jointly to produce with van Gogh a film about the Islamic oppression of women.

The Dutch were not alone in their worries. All over Europe media pundits, entertainers and politicians were forced to ponder the chilling possibility that cross-border co-operation among closely connected jihad cells might mean that they, too, were threatened by the new terror.

For some Dutch officials it was evidence of a social experiment gone horribly wrong. “We were naive in thinking people would exist in society together,” said Rita Verdonk, the immigration and integration minister whose name also appears on the death list.

She added that Moroccan immigrants “have never learnt about Dutch values”, despite efforts to train them to respect the country’s mores.

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