Amsterdam - Dutch police on Thursday said the sudden increase of mutilated porpoises washing onto the Dutch coast remains a mystery.

Between December and early March, more than 113 of the mammals had washed ashore on the northern Dutch coast. Almost half of them were severely mutilated, the cadavres showing multiple knife cuts or being cut in entirely half.

Amsterdam  - Several Dutch KLM Airlines aircraft have altimeter problems, Dutch BNR News Radio reported on Wednesday.

Referring to "classified files" given to BNR, the radio station said KLM has registered altimeter problems on 17 occasions in the past six months.

On February 25, a Boeing 737-800 from Turkish Airlines crashed near Amsterdam. Nine people were killed and 121 injured. Preliminary results from the ongoing investigation said a faulty altimeter was the cause of the crash.

Amsterdam - Dutch aviation experts began Monday with the work to remove the wreckage of the Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane in a painstaking effort to reassemble the plane to try to help determine the cause of the crash.

Dutch media reported that work on Monday and Tuesday would concentrate on removing small parts from the wreckage from the site where the plane went down on February 25.

Removal of the cockpit and further fuselage sections, the wings and the tail will take place on the following three days through Friday.

Amsterdam - The mood at the Dutch stock exchange remained pessimistic on Friday with Amsterdam's main index AEX remaining under 200 points.

By 12:50 pm (1150 GMT) the AEX stood at 199 points, slightly up from its 15-year-low of 198.22 points reached half an hour before.

Bank and insurer giant ING Group saw its share value drop most (down 5.58 per cent) and now stood at 2.469 euros (3.099 dollars).

Next in line were TNT postal service (down 2.74 per cent) and chip manufacturer AMSL (down 2.50 per cent).

Amsterdam/Madrid - Dutch authorities have requested the extradition of a Colombian national from Madrid to the Netherlands, Dutch media reported on Friday.

Spanish police detained the 26-year-old in Madrid after he was suspected of robbing a jewellery shop at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport in August.

The man allegedly belongs to an international ring robbing banks and jewellery shops.

Last August six men and three women, all believed to be South Americans, seized booty worth 117,000 euros at Gassan Diamonds in Amsterdam.

They were believed to have flown in from Paris and committed the robbery during a 90-minute stopover before flying on to Istanbul.