Naoufal F. acquitted in Iranian man's murder, conviction in Diemen murder attempt stands

Naoufal F., who was sentenced to life in prison by a court, had his sentence reduced to 25 years and four months after an appeal on Wednesday. The Amsterdam Court of Appeal ruled that the 44-year-old from Amsterdam is guilty of ordering a brutal daylight assassination attempt in Diemen in November 2015, but acquitted him of ordering the assassination of Iranian man Ali Motamed in Almere two weeks later.

Prosecutors had again recommended a life sentence against F. The court read the verdict from the highly-secured courthouse near Schiphol Airport.

F., also known as “Noffel,” was sentenced to 18 years in jail in 2018 for the murder attempt in Diemen in which dozens of shots were fired at Peter R. The court ruled that he had issued an order to kill the Amsterdam criminal who barely survived the attack.

R. managed to survive by trying to chase down the gunmen in his car before he drove into a drainage ditch off Fregat. First responders had to fish him out of the water and pull him into an ambulance to begin treatment. He was then transported to a hospital.

Prosecutors in the original case presenting evidence based on chat messages sent via the encrypted platform Ennetcom, which was shut down by authorities. The court found it proven in 2018 that F. issued the command to kill R. while F. was hiding out in an apartment in Ireland, where he was eventually arrested.

The following year, the district court added a life sentence on allegations that F. helped orchestrate the murder of Ali Motamed, an Eneco mechanic who was not believed to have any ties to the criminal underworld. The Iranian died as a result of the shooting in front of his home in Almere in 2015.

The Court of Appeal said there was evidence that F. had attempted to solicit Motamed's murder, which was only prevented because the gunman he recruited was jailed before the Almere incident. However, the court said there was not enough evidence to show that he was involved in the actual murder. Acting as an "intermediary and conduit" is not enough to demand a life sentence, the court said.

F. was instead convicted on appeal of the lesser crime of attempted solicitation of murder, and his conviction for wide-scale money laundering was also upheld. F. "spoke with apparent ease and without any moral sense about this murder as a purely business matter, a nice gig,” the court wrote in a statement. "The court considers that the defendant’s actions left no doubt about his ruthless and merciless attitude: a human life was worth nothing to him, the risk of more victims did not matter."

F.’s lawyers were stunned by this decision but said that the acquittal of arranging a murder was “completely correct.” They said last month that this should never have been a conviction partly because the assassination was already discussed in decrypted communications long before the device attributed to F. came into the picture.

They also recalled that Stefan Blok, the Minister of Interior Affairs at the time, told Parliament that the intelligence services AIVD and MIVD had “strong” indications that the government of Iran was behind the murder of Motamed. The attorneys pointed out that nothing was found during the investigation to suggest any contact between Iran and any phone that F. had used.

Motamed allegedly lived in the Netherlands under a false name. He was presumed to be on the run from the Iranian regime after committing a bloody murder.