“In every Pakistani embassy are people from the ISI, the Pakistani secret service,” said Daniel Bastard of Reporters Without Borders. “Their job is to ensure that Pakistani citizens in exile do not raise sensitive issues.” This also applies to the Pakistani embassy in The Hague, he says.
But now they seem to have taken the next step, to plot a murder. Something that happens more often in Pakistan itself, says Immig. “Political murders and disappearances are regularly reported there. The army and the secret service have a hand in that.” Immig is concerned that it has now almost come to that in the Netherlands: “You see that they are undertaking increasingly serious intimidation and liquidation attempts in other countries.”
Unacceptable hostile actions
This has most likely been successful in the Netherlands twice before. For example, in 2015 the Iranian Mahammad Samadi in Almere brought to life. He was sentenced to death in absentia in Iran because he was seen as the perpetrator of an attack in Pakistan, allegedly carried out by the resistance movement to which Samadi belonged.
Two years later, the also Iranian Ahmad Mola Nissi was thrown out on the street in The Hague shot dead. Nissi had fled his country ten years earlier and led an independence movement that Iran considers a terrorist organization. It was the first attacks by foreign spies in the Netherlands since 1938 Fidelity at the time.
The then Minister of Foreign Affairs Blok said in 2019 that the AIVD strong clues believed that Iran was behind the two assassination attempts. Blok called the attacks “unacceptably hostile actions that grossly violate Dutch sovereignty”. Shortly before that, the European Union had already decided to impose sanctions against Iran because of the liquidations in the Netherlands and the thwarted attacks in France and Denmark.
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