A 37-year-old Rotterdam police officer is being prosecuted for perjury in connection with a violent arrest. That is what the Public Prosecution Service makes announced Wednesday. The agent in question was part of a unit that wanted to search the 41-year-old Rotterdam garage owner Atik Samur preventively in the summer of 2020. When the man indicated that he did not want to cooperate, he was arrested and the officer handed out a headbutt. For the headbutt itself, the agent was previously sentenced to a fine of 250 euros.
In his police report, the officer wrote that he was forced to use force. The man is said to have “grabbed him vigorously” and “looked at him aggressively”. A second agent backed up that story. Camera images showed the opposite to be true: not the man, but the officer in question turned out to be the aggressor.
Now the agent is suspected of perjury. When drawing up an official report, the OM believes, the agent deliberately lied. At the end of last year, the court in Rotterdam ruled that the police had “deliberately” withheld information. Earlier, the Rotterdam police claimed the opposite NRC that there is “no reason to believe that there has been malicious intent or lying.” According to the Public Prosecution Service, “there can be no question of a mistake or a different perception of the agent and he must have done this consciously”. The case is now being submitted to the court in The Hague.