Customs officers and container company employees at the port of Rotterdam are paid by criminals to help them traffic drugs into the Netherlands, NOS and RTV Rijnmond report based on conversations the police tapped and the broadcasters were allowed to hear.
The port workers sometimes receive millions of euros to cooperate with the criminals, according to the broadcasters. At least three customs officers were bribed in this way.
No Surrender founder Klaas Otto, currently in custody in the Middelburg prison, was able to listen to the tapped conversations of other inmates due to a police blunder, NOS reports. Otto is in custody because he is suspected of extortion, assault and arson, amongst other things. In preparation for his trial, he requested the tapped recordings of phone calls he made from prison. He also got the tapped conversations of other prisoners.
An Australian tech company called Appen is in possession of the private telephone conversations of thousands of Dutch, according to the Volkskrant. Telephone experts think the most likely scenario is that the conversations were tapped by British intelligence agency GCHQ.
There are no concrete indications that Mohammed B., the man serving a life sentence for the 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh, had any accomplices in the murder, according to the CTIVD, the commission supervising the intelligence and security services.
