Wilders to attend trial against man who offered money for his murder on social media

PVV leader Geert Wilders will go to court on Tuesday to attend the trial against 37-year-old Pakistani cricket player Khalid Latif. According to the Public Prosecution Service (OM), Latif offered 21,000 euros for the parliamentarian’s murder via a video posted on the internet in 2018.

The OM is prosecuting the Pakistani for incitement to murder, sedition, and threats. The suspect is a well-known person in his home country, so the Dutch police recognized him in the videos. His case is being tried in the high-security court at Schiphol. Latif is not expected to attend his trial. According to the OM, he has not reported, and neither has a lawyer.

Wilders announced he would attend the case against the man “who put a price on my head.” Wilders said on platform X last week that he was curious and hoped that the OM would also prosecute the two religious men “who issued fatwas against me.”

Latif was suspended for five years in 2017 for involvement in a spot-fixing scandal. Spot-fixing is betting on a certain element of a match that may or may not occur. It is not the manipulation of a match’s outcome. That is match-fixing.

In February 2021, the court in The Hague sentenced another Pakistani, Junaid I., to ten years in prison for, among other things, preparing a terrorist attack on Wilders. I. was angry about a cartoon contest of the prophet Mohammed that Wilders had organized in 2018. I. traveled to the Netherlands in August 2018 and posted a video on Facebook in which he announced an attack on Wilders or the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament.