AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

The bomb aboard the number nine tram claimed seventeen lives. Sixteen were passengers.

The seventeenth was the driver of a nearby postal truck. Mail from his shattered vehicle littered the cobblestones in front of the Museum of the Tropics and fluttered, like tiny flags, from the branches of the linden trees.

An hour later, in a shaky VHS video delivered to the studios of Al Jazeera in Dakar, a masked man, posing in front of a green banner, took responsibility for the outrage. A group calling themselves Justice for Islam, he said, had acted “in reprisal for Dutch support of the American crusaders’ continuing occupation of Iraq.” The Dutch had withdrawn their last troops from Iraq long since, but that was something the terrorists chose to overlook.

The incident took place on a glorious April day, chilly but without the usual breeze. The absence of wind ensured that much of the scattered mail stayed in the area of the blast instead of littering the neighboring streets and being blown into canals.

As soon as the authorities liberated the area around the truck, postal employees moved in and gathered up what they could. The salvaged mail was stuffed into canvas sacks and carried away to the Central Post Office on the Oosterdokskade, where a team under the leadership of Postal Inspector Marnix Gans started sorting it.

Some of the letters and packages were relatively undamaged. These were immediately fed back into the system and sent on their way. Some pieces had suffered the effects of the explosion, the resulting fire, and the water that had been used to put the fire out. Wherever addresses were still legible, tape was used for repairs and that mail, too, was sent on its way. Finally, Gans’s team got down to the hard part: trying to piece together fragments and subjecting charred remnants to ultraviolet and infrared lights in an attempt to decipher addresses unreadable to the naked eye.