The bridge is one of very few points where you can cross from the Southern part of the Netherlands into the Northern part ( https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.6106721,5.6448216,16z?hl=en ), and has cameras on it making it an ideal choke point for ~30% of the North-South traffic in NL.

The burglaries were all in Friesland, quite a bit further North and the thieves iirc came from Amsterdam all the way to the North to hit wealthy looking solitary houses (of which there are quite a few in the North and almost none near Amsterdam where the population density is a lot higher).

So I can totally see why the police figured that this would work and it did.

Anyway, I can't readily find a citation but I recall the case clearly because there was a lot of uproar here that the thieves were set free when it was 100% clear that they were guilty based on how they were discovered.

But all my queries regarding 'ketelbrug, vrijspraak, inbrekers' do not return anything useful.