Dutch Court Sentences Leader Of Super Cartel To Life Imprisonment

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

AMSTERDAM (Worthy News) – A Dutch court has sentenced the head of a violent Dubai-based “super cartel” that supplied a third of Europe’s cocaine to life imprisonment over several murders and attempted killings.

Ridouan Taghi, who prosecutors said oversaw a “well-oiled killing machine” was among three gang members given life terms in a trial that shook the Netherlands, long-regarded as a liberal nation.

Some 14 others were sentenced to between 21 months and 29 years in jail after one of the largest trials in Dutch criminal history, whose nearly six years of hearings were marked by three more related murders.

Taghi allegedly also ordered three murders during the trial, including of a top lawyer and a prominent journalist in the Netherlands, and pulling strings even from behind bars following his arrest in Dubai in 2019.

The United Arab Emirates has become a hub for powerful European traffickers, and Taghi, 46, was a crucial player in the flow of drugs through the Dutch port of Rotterdam, investigators said.

Taghi, with Irish, Italian, and Bosnian drug traffickers, formed part of a “super-cartel” directing cocaine shipments to Europe, according to law enforcement.

It turned the Netherlands into a “narco-state” as one of Europe’s biggest markets and a growing production hub for synthetic drugs, experts say.

DRUGS TRADE

The drug trade was accompanied by extreme violence, with the case focusing on six charges of murder, four of attempted murder, and several more of planning various hit operations between 2015 and 2017. The attacks were mainly directed against people the gang suspected had become police informants.

The court convicted Taghi in five of the murders. “He decided who would be killed and spared no one,” the judge said. “The amount of suffering Taghi caused to the victims and their loved ones is barely imaginable.”

The judges also ruled he used extreme violence to intimidate enemies and potential police informants. “By doing so, he prevented people from cooperating with the police. Such terror has a disruptive effect on society,” the judge said.

Three murders, all related to a suspected gang member named as Nabil B., who handed himself in to police and agreed to be the prosecution’s main witness, were also committed during the trial and are the subject of separate court proceedings.

As part of a plea deal, Nabil B., whose testimony the court ruled was trustworthy, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. B. was, however, expected to be soon released from prison and will be put in a special witness protection program after several close to him were killed, sources close to the trial said.

B.’s brother was killed in 2018. His lawyer, Derk Wiersum, was shot dead outside his home in Amsterdam the following year, and in July 2021, Peter R. de Vries, a well-known crime journalist who acted as B.’s confidant, was gunned down in central Amsterdam.

De Vries, who had said he was on Taghi’s hit list, was shot in the street five times as he walked to his car from a television studio and later died of his injuries. Prosecutors have sought life sentences for three of the suspects in his killing. Those three murders had given the already grim trial “a pitch-black edge,” the presiding judge told a packed courtroom on Tuesday.

The judge said it was painful that De Vries would “never again be sitting on the press benches” at the court.

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