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The Hague - A Dutch appeal court in The Hague has acquitted seven men accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation known as the "Hofstad" group. The men were arrested in 2004 on suspicion of preparing terrorist attacks in the Netherlands. The arrests took place shortly after the killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. The appeal court ruled that the group was a network, but it did not have a common ideology with terrorist intent. The sentence of the main suspect Jason Walters, originally a US citizen, remains the same at 15 years. He threw a grenade at police shortly...

AMERSFOORT, The Netherlands -- Jason Walters was the consummate outsider, his neighbors recalled, the loner who never quite fit in, the one the other kids liked to bully at school. He was the son of a black American father and a Dutch woman, and had few friends. He was pro-American, they said, perhaps because of his father. Suddenly last month, Walters, 19, was arrested after a violent hours-long standoff with police, in one of a series of raids on suspected Muslim terrorist cells following the Nov. 2 assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an alleged Muslim extremist. According to...