Appeal starts in case around Amsterdam girl's violent kidnapping in 2016

Over 7.5 years after Insiya Hemani’s abduction in Amsterdam, the appeal case against the now 10-year-old girl’s kidnappers will start this week.

A group of men violently abducted the then 2-year-old toddler from her grandmother’s home in Amsterdam on 29 September 2016 and smuggled her to her father in India. She is still there. On Insiya’s 10th birthday last month, her mother, Nadia Rashid, posted a new call for her return.

In 2020, A Dutch court convicted Insiya’s father, Shehzad Hemani, of orchestrating her abduction and sentenced him to nine years in prison. Attempts to get him extradited from India have so far been unsuccessful. A year earlier, the court sentenced six others to up to four years and three months in prison for abducting the girl and smuggling her out of the country.

From Tuesday, Hemani and five of the other abductors will stand trial on appeal. Hemani won’t attend in person. The court set five days aside for the trial, Parool reported.

The abductors thought they were doing the right thing when they took the girl, lawyer Nancy Dekens, representing former police officer Erik S., told Parool. According to her, Rashid only filed for divorce from Hemani after she was in the Netherlands with Insiya and was keeping the child away from him. The court ignored that history in its first ruling, the lawyer said.

S. has not yet served his sentence of four years and three months in prison, only spending around five months in pre-trial custody. The now 66-year-old man is not doing well, his lawyer said. “His life has come to a standstill; he has bladder cancer and has already undergone several surgeries,” Dekens said. Given that and the long time it took for this case to come to appeal, Dekens hopes the appeals court will keep him out of prison.