Photos of tortured woman on Taghi's phone may be missing Amsterdam woman
A Blackberry phone found in Dubai in December 2019 during Ridouan Taghi's arrest contained photos of a naked, tortured woman. The authorities believe the woman is Naima Jilal, who went missing in October 2019, Het Parool reports based on the criminal file in the major Marengo assassinations trial around Taghi and the drug-centered gang allegedly around him.
Jilal was last seen getting into a car near her home on Gustav Mahlerlaan in Amsterdam Zuidas at around 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, 20 October 2019, according to her missing person page on the police website. Her family hasn't heard from her since. "We suspect that she became the victim of a crime," the police said about the Dutch-Moroccan woman.
A photo on the found Blackberry shows a naked woman tied to a chair with tape, the newspaper wrote. Another shows the woman's abdomen with what appears to be a cut-off finger and a toe. A third shows the woman lying naked on her stomach on the floor. From the photos' metadata, the police determined that they were taken on the night of 20 to 21 October 2019 - the same night Jilal went missing.
Taghi's lawyer told Parool that it is "forensically completely unclear where that phone or those photos come from." She said that "it cannot be said that this phone can be linked to my client." According to the newspaper, photos of a dead Jilal have circulated in the underworld for some time.
Investigators suspected from the time of her disappearance that Jilal might have been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, according to NOS and Het Parool. She was known as "Tante," which translates to "aunt," in the drug world. She allegedly did business with several well-known Dutch cocaine smugglers and was involved in multiple conflicts in the drug environment.
In March last year, authorities found a handbag and items of clothing buried under a warehouse in the port of Antwerp. The Belgian and Dutch police suspect the items belonged to Jilal. Het Parool and De Telegraaf report that the cops seized 4,200 kilos of cocaine in that warehouse a year earlier.
