Mohammed Bouyeri : biography
Mohammed Bouyeri () (born 8 March 1978 in Amsterdam) is an Islamist Dutch–Moroccan and convicted murderer. He is serving a life sentence without parole for the assassination of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. He holds both Dutch and Moroccan citizenship. He was a member of the Hofstad Network.
Life
In 1995, Mohammed Bouyeri finished his secondary education. He changed his major several times and left after five years without obtaining a degree.
A second generation migrant from Morocco, Bouyeri used the pen name "Abu Zubair" for writing and translating. On the Internet he often posted letters and sent e-mail under this name.
At an early age he was known to the police as a member of a group of Moroccan "problem-youth". For a while he worked as a volunteer at Eigenwijks, a neighbourhood organization in the Slotervaart suburb of Amsterdam. After his mother died and his father re-married in the fall of 2003, he started to live according to strict interpretations of Islamic Sharia law. As a result he could perform fewer and fewer tasks at Eigenwijks. For example, he refused to serve alcohol and did not want to be present at activities attended by both women and men. Finally, he put an end to his activities at Eigenwijks altogether. He grew a beard and began to wear a djellaba. He frequently visited the El Tawheed mosque where he met other radical Muslims, among whom was the suspected terrorist Samir Azzouz. With the group of radicals he is said to have formed the Hofstad Network, a Dutch terrorist cell. He claims to have assassinated van Gogh to fulfill his duty as a Muslim. Serving as witness in another court case involving the Hofstad group in May 2007, Bouyeri for the time expressed in more depth his thoughts regarding Islam. Here he said that armed jihad was the only option of Muslims in the Netherlands and that democracy was always a violation of Islam because laws cannot be produced by humans but only by Allah.
Assassination of Theo van Gogh
Bouyeri assassinated Van Gogh in the early morning of 2 November 2004, in Amsterdam, in front of the Amsterdam East borough office (stadsdeelkantoor) on the corner of the Linnaeusstraat and Tweede Oosterparkstraat (), while he was bicycling to work., retrieved July 21, 2009 Bouyeri stabbed van Gogh eight times and Van Gogh died on the spot. He left a note on Van Gogh’s corpse before fleeing. The note threatened Western governments, Jews and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who went into hiding). The note also contained references to the ideologies of the Egyptian organization Takfir wal-Hijra. Six years after the assassination, in a letter to a Muslim group in Belgium, he writes that he still has no regret killing Van Gogh.
Arrest
On 2 November 2004, shortly after the assassination of Theo van Gogh, Bouyeri was arrested close to the scene of the crime, following an exchange of gunfire with police during which he was shot in the leg. In his interrogations, he exercised his right to remain silent. On November 11, public prosecutor Leo de Wit accused him of six criminal acts: murder, attempted murder (of a police officer), attempted manslaughter (of by-standers and police officers), violation of the law on gun-control, suspicion of participation in a criminal organization with terrorist aims, and conspiracy to murder with a terrorist purpose Van Gogh, member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others.
When arrested, Bouyeri had on him a farewell poem with the title In bloed gedoopt from which it appears he intended to die a martyr. The poem contains the following lines:
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