Man who threatened to poison Albert Heijn customers sentenced to 2.5 years on appeal

The Amsterdam Court of Appeal sentenced a man to 2.5 years in prison for attempting to extort the supermarket chain Albert Heijn by threatening to poison its customers. The sentence is significantly higher than the court originally imposed on the man in 2020. The appeals court found a higher sentence justified given the severity of the crime.

At the end of 2016, the then 20-year-old man informed Albert Heijn’s parent company Ahold Delhaize that it would poison the food in supermarket branches with dinitrophenol (DNP) if it didn’t pay him 377,777 euros in cryptocurrency. He had packages containing DNP sent from England to the Ahold head office and three Albert Heijn stores to reinforce his threat. The police intercepted the packages and arrested the suspect.

In early 2020, the court in Noord-Holland sentenced the man to two years in prison, one of which was conditionally suspended. Both the man and the Public Prosecution Service (OM) appealed.

In the appeal hearing, the man again claimed that he was not the one who extorted the supermarket chain. He said someone else forced him to create the dark web accounts through which the DNP was ordered, but had no further involvement. His lawyer argued for his acquittal, or a prison sentence equal to what the man had already served during his pre-trial detention.

The OM argued for a much higher sentence, stressing the severity of the extortion. The Amsterdam Court of Appeal sided with the OM on Wednesday.

The court did not believe that the man was only indirectly involved in the extortion, pointing out that the man had repeatedly adjusted his defense in recent years to match the results of the police investigation. That did not benefit his credibility.

The appeals court also stressed the severity of the crime. If the man had gone through with his threats, it would have been “disastrous” for Albert Heijn and its customers, making the extortion “potentially disruptive for society as a whole.” Albert Heijn is the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands and most locals shop there at least occasionally.

The Court of Appeal said the severity of the crime justifies an even higher sentence, but the court reduced the sentence somewhat to accommodate for the circumstances. The man was young when the crime was committed, had no previous convictions, and the appeal took much longer than usual. The appeals court cut six months off the sentence, sentencing the man to 30 months in prison.