Geert Wilders says he wants them extradited, convicted and jailed
The Hague:
Dutch prosecutors said on Wednesday they were putting two Pakistani nationals on trial for inciting the murder of anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders and asked Islamabad for legal help in the matter.
The judge sentenced him in September last year Pakistani cricketer Khalid Latif The firebrand lawmaker was jailed for 12 years for urging people to murder Wilders after he tried to arrange a contest for caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
The prosecution said it was prosecuting two Pakistani nationals, one a 55-year-old religious leader and the other a 29-year-old political leader, “who called on their followers to murder a Dutch parliamentarian.”
“This was done during meetings and on social media via video and text messages,” it said in a statement.
The religious leader allegedly called for Wilders’ murder because his followers would “be rewarded in the afterlife,” while the political leader said since Latif’s conviction “it’s up to his own followers to carry out this mission.”
The two men will go on trial on September 2 at a high-security court near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
Dutch authorities have asked Islamabad for legal aid to question suspects and serve summonses to appear in court.
However, there is no mutual legal assistance treaty with Pakistan and it seems unlikely that the two men will be in the dock.
Geert Wilders Two names were posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, but prosecutors are not naming the suspects for privacy reasons.
AFP could not independently verify the names.
“I want them extradited, convicted and imprisoned!” Wilders said.
Dutch authorities tried to question Latif about the case and sought legal aid from Pakistan, but to no avail.
Wilders canceled the cartoon competition after protests broke out in Pakistan and he received numerous death threats. He has been under 24-hour state protection since 2004.
Plans to stage the tournament have been widely criticized in the Netherlands, with politicians, local media and ordinary people criticizing the idea as unnecessarily angering Muslims.
But calls for Wilders’ assassination appear to be resonating, and in 2019 a Pakistani man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting to assassinate Wilders after the tournament was cancelled.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
