On Tuesday, 20 October 2026, the Overijssel District Court, sitting in Zwolle, sentenced a man from the city to 16 years in prison, unsuspended, for several counts of attempted murder and unlawful possession of firearms. That is a first-instance judgment, not an arrest. Two weeks earlier the prosecution had asked for 20 years. The two figures do not match.

The court’s notice speaks of a 24-year-old man. NOS writes 28. Those are two ages, not one. De Stentor names him R.Y. The victim, in NOS’s account, is Emin Y., known from the same criminal milieu. The court, in its public statement, does not name him: it says only that the shooter had a conflict with him.

On the evening of 13 September 2024, after a conversation in the car park of a Zwolle football-club canteen, the man left for home with a friend. He then collected an automatic weapon and two pistols from a storage room, returned, and walked into the canteen armed. The target escaped through a window. Outside, from a few metres, the man fired 25 rounds. Three hit the intended victim, who was wounded. Other bullets went through the façade into the canteen, where at least three people were present.

NOS names the club FC Ulu Spor. The court says only “a Zwolle football club”. The defence pleaded self-defence and duress: the victim had threatened him, had a weapon that night, the shooter was on a death list. The court rejected that. Possible threats, it wrote, do not erase liability. Between the talk and the shots he had time to think again: premeditation.

For those in the canteen, the judges did not find that he meant to kill them, but they found that he accepted the risk that the bullets might. Hence attempted murder in respect of them as well. That the victim’s injuries were relatively limited and that nobody died, the court said, is not to the convicted man’s credit. It counted against him that he took the law into his own hands in a criminal-milieu conflict and that he still had two pistols with ammunition.

NOS ties the episode to a longer feud, including a possible theft of a courier service’s client list between gangs. That is investigative context, not Tuesday’s operative part. NOS also notes that Emin Y., 33, was sentenced in June to 10 and a half years for organised drug trafficking and a violent kidnapping: that is another judgment, in another case. Tuesday’s sentence is for the 2024 shooting, not for that file.

Image: the former Palace of Justice on Blijmarkt 20 in Zwolle, June 1962, Gerard Dukker / Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The palace of that time, now a museum, not the 2026 courtroom.

Sources consulted: 16 jaar cel voor schietpartij met automatisch wapen bij voetbalclub in Zwolle — NOS; 16 jaar cel voor schietpartij met automatisch vuurwapen op voetbalclub — Rechtspraak; 16 jaar cel voor beschieten drugskopstuk bij voetbalclub in Zwolle — De Stentor.