Suspect in crime reporter's murder not getting a fair trial, lawyer says

Delano G., the 22-year-old accused of shooting and killing Peter R. de Vries last year, has not received a fair trial, one of his lawyers, Ronald van der Horst, said in his plea on Wednesday. The lawyer said that G. is being tried on a completely anonymized criminal file, severely limiting his options to defend himself. And that is against the applicable rules, according to the lawyer. The prosecution of G. is therefore invalid, and the case should be dropped, the lawyer said.

“In many people’s eyes, Peter R. de Vries devoted an important part of his professional life to ensuring the fairness of the criminal process. That makes it extra wry that this case has so little to do with a fair trial,” said Van der Horst.

The Public Prosecution Service (OM) omitted almost all names from the file for security reasons. Witnesses, detectives, and forensic experts are not mentioned by name. According to the OM, De Vries’s murder is almost certainly the result of his work for the key witness in the Marengo assassinations trial around Ridouan Taghi. De Vries acted as a confidant for key witness Nabil B., whose brother and lawyer were murdered in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

According to Van der Horst, the judiciary has “never properly motivated this shadowing.” The OM has “not fought with an open file.” “The anonymization was wrongly not passed by a judge,” said the lawyer. The “unprecedented” method used in the De Vries case made him wonder whether one human life is worth more than another. He also pointed out the condolences offered by King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte after De Vries’s death. “Where were they when others died?”

Van der Horst said that there is “no evidence at all” that G. knew he was going to shoot Peter R. de Vries. And the lawyer called G.’s alleged connection with Marengo “completely hollow rhetoric” and “just nonsense.” The attack may have come from a different angle and “have been put together very differently,” the lawyer said. “We just don’t know.”

According to the lawyer, there is no direct evidence that the Rotterdam man was the perpetrator. The OM, which last week demanded life in prison against G. and co-defendant Kamil E. (36), says the opposite: the evidence is overwhelming. G. and E. were arrested in a car less than an hour after the attack on De Vries on July 6 last year. The police found the murder weapon in the car, and G. had gunpowder on his hand.

G. invoked his right to remain silent during the trial, much to the outrage of Tahmina Akefi, De Vries’s partner, who got a chance to speak on Wednesday. “Shocking is the gunman’s contempt in his silent,” Akefi said in her victim statement. “Any idiot can pull a trigger. But talking takes guts.”

Akefi told what De Vries was doing in the days before his murder. He launched the foundation De Gouden Tip, with which he wanted to force a breakthrough in the unsolved murder of Tanja Groen in 1993. “He was determined again to solve a painful puzzle. And during those days, the suspects were busy taking his life.” She called it “an infernal ordeal” to sit in court within six feet of “two cold-hearted killers.”

Last week De Vries’s children also used their right to speak. Daughter Kelly addressed the suspects directly. “Delano, I’m looking at you the way you dared not look at my father when you shot him from behind.”

De Vries was gunned down on Lange Leidsedwarstraat in Amsterdam shortly after he left the RTL Boulevard studio at 7:26 p.m. on July 6 last year. He was shot multiple times while walking to his car in the parking garage further down the street. He succumbed to his injuries in hospital nine days after the attack.