Today, the court wants to hear public prosecutor Henk Mous and lawyer Evert Kuiters under oath in the drug case Maggiora in Meppel. It is quite rare for a prosecutor to be required to testify in a criminal case.
Four members of the drug gang appealed against their sentences, which the court in Assen imposed on them in 2017. He was then sentenced to eight years in prison. One of the lawyers, Sanne Schuurman, says he has evidence that the Public Prosecution Service (OM) made secret agreements with one of the suspects: Ivo J.
Mous would have promised J. that he would get a lower sentence if he would cooperate. An attempt has been made to make a secret deal. Without the knowledge of the court in Assen and the lawyers of the co-defendants. Making agreements with criminals sometimes happens, but always in public.
Schuurman relies on mail and app traffic that she has in her hands. This would show that Mous and the national witness protection officer had contact with J. and with his lawyer Kuiters. That is why the court also wants to hear Kuiters under oath. The Public Prosecution Service would even have paid J.’s attorney’s fees, Schuurman says.
Mous denies this. J. received a lower sentence because he cooperated from the start during the criminal investigation. This gave the Public Prosecution Service more evidence to convict the other suspects. J. took risks, because he eventually had to go into hiding because of his cooperative attitude.
The hearing under oath would already take place in February. This was then postponed, because not all statements of J. had been fully put on paper by the police. There were differences in the audio recordings of the interrogations and what eventually ended up on paper. The court previously ruled that all those forty interrogations still had to be worked out literally.
The interrogation under oath is only possible if all interrogations are literally on paper. Kuiters previously indicated that as a lawyer he has secrecy and will therefore invoke his right of nondisclosure. For that reason he does not have to give answers, if he does not consider it necessary.