Ad K. was sentenced on appeal to sixteen years in prison for the manslaughter of Patrick van Dillenburg. According to the court in Amsterdam, K., who was acquitted last March, also had Van Dillenburg’s body disappear twenty years ago. The court has announced on Wednesday. Immediately after the verdict, K. was taken away by the police. Co-defendant Fred T. has since passed away.
Earlier, the Public Prosecution Service had demanded a prison sentence of eighteen years against the two suspects in an appeal. The sentence was lower because the court of appeal – unlike the judiciary – ruled that there was no murder.
Read also mr. Big method: first you lure the suspect with money, then you make him confess
Evidence against K. was collected during an undercover operation: the police used the so-called Mr. Big method. The judge who acquitted K. last year stated that the method did not meet the legal requirements. For example, there would have been too much pressure on K. to confess, so that the suspect ended up in an interrogation situation unknowingly.
However, the Amsterdam court ruled on Wednesday that the undercover action may have misled K., but no pressure was exerted on him to make him confess.
mr. Big is a strategy of undercover agents to befriend a suspect. They try to gain his or her trust in order to elicit a testimony and possibly promise a criminal collaboration or amount of money. To do this, the suspect must first be transparent about his own past. The method is not uncontroversial internationally: critics denounce its misleading character and state that the chance of a false meaning is high.
Financial promises
The agents who tried to seduce K. offered him a sum of money if he would confess his own past. After three conversations, he said he shot Van Dillenburg – whose body has never been found until now. He would then have thrown the body into a shredder. The body remains would then have been scattered on a bulb field around Noordwijkerhout. K. later stated that he made up the story because he had succumbed to the financial promises.
Patrick van Dillenburg, then 38 years old, has been missing since January 2002. He had a criminal past and in 1991 was involved in a robbery of the Van Gogh Museum. Twenty paintings were taken, which were recovered shortly after the theft.