Originally published 2021-07-18.
Peter R. de Vries, the best-known crime reporter in the Netherlands, was shot in the head on a central Amsterdam street on the evening of 6 July 2021 and died in hospital nine days later, on 15 July, aged 64. Two suspects were arrested within hours. In June 2024 an Amsterdam court convicted the gunman and the getaway driver of murder and sentenced each of them to 28 years in prison.
His death shocked a country that thinks of itself as safe and open, and it became a symbol of how far organised crime linked to the cocaine trade had reached into Dutch public life.
The shooting near Leidseplein
At around 7.30 pm on 6 July, de Vries walked out of the studio of the RTL Boulevard television show, where he had just appeared as a guest, and headed for his car on Lange Leidsedwarsstraat, a narrow street close to the busy Leidseplein square. A gunman opened fire and hit him in the head. He was rushed to the Amsterdam UMC hospital at the VU medical centre in critical condition.
That same evening police stopped a car on the A4 motorway near Leidschendam and arrested two men. A third person detained in Amsterdam was released the next day and cleared. The suspected shooter was a 21-year-old from Rotterdam, Delano G., and the suspected driver was Kamil E., a 35-year-old Polish man living in the Netherlands.
De Vries never regained consciousness. When he died, his family released a short statement: "Peter fought to the end, but was unable to win the battle."
Who Peter R. de Vries was
Born in Aalsmeer in November 1956, de Vries started at the daily newspaper De Telegraaf in 1978 and drifted towards crime reporting. In 1987 he became editor of the weekly Aktueel and turned it into a crime magazine. His television programme, Peter R. de Vries, misdaadverslaggever ("crime reporter"), ran from 1995 to 2012 and set Dutch viewing records.
He was famous for refusing to let unsolved cases go. He reopened miscarriages of justice, chased fugitives and confronted suspects on camera. Internationally he became known for his work on the disappearance of the American teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba: a 2008 broadcast with hidden-camera footage of Joran van der Sloot drew about seven million viewers, a record for non-sports television in the Netherlands, and won an International Emmy for current affairs.
In later years he increasingly worked alongside lawyers and acted as adviser and confidant to witnesses. In 2017 he co-founded a law firm with lawyer Khalid Kasem, serving as company director rather than as a lawyer.
The Heineken kidnapping and Willem Holleeder
De Vries first made his name with the 1983 kidnapping of beer magnate Freddy Heineken and his driver, Ab Doderer. He covered the case closely and wrote two books about it. The second, about the abduction itself, was later adapted into the English-language film Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, in which Anthony Hopkins played Heineken.
One of the kidnappers was Willem Holleeder, who served a prison sentence for the crime and later became the country's most notorious underworld figure. Holleeder and de Vries had a long and hostile history. In 2016, while already in custody, Holleeder was arrested on suspicion of trying to arrange the killing of his own sisters and of de Vries; he denied it. In 2019 Holleeder was sentenced to life imprisonment for five murders and a manslaughter, a sentence upheld on appeal in 2022 and by the Supreme Court in 2024.
The Marengo trial and a pattern of killings
At the time of his death, de Vries was acting as confidant to Nabil B., the state's crown witness in the Marengo trial, the biggest gangland case in Dutch history. The main defendant in that case was Ridouan Taghi, accused of leading a drug-trafficking organisation responsible for a series of contract killings.
The people around Nabil B. had paid a terrible price. His brother was shot dead in 2018, and in September 2019 his lawyer, Derk Wiersum, was murdered outside his home in Amsterdam. In 2019 prosecutors told de Vries that he was on Taghi's hit list, a claim Taghi denied; Taghi, already in prison when de Vries was shot, has denied any involvement in the killing. He had received many threats over the years but, according to reports, declined police protection and private security, a choice that later prompted an independent review of how threats against him had been handled.
Taghi was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Marengo case in February 2024.
The trial and the 2024 verdict
The murder trial opened in Amsterdam in June 2022. In June 2024 the court found six men guilty. Delano G., the gunman, and Kamil E., the driver, each received 28 years. Krystian M., described as the "murder broker" who organised the hit from the Netherlands, was sentenced to 26 years; he was the only one to admit his role and apologise to the family. Others were convicted of helping, and some defendants were acquitted.
The judges said it remained unclear exactly why de Vries was killed and who ultimately ordered it. His role in the Marengo case was the most obvious possible motive, but the court did not treat it as proven. For his family and for Dutch journalists, the question of who gave the order still hangs over the case.
Reactions and the safety of journalists in Europe
King Willem-Alexander called the shooting an attack on journalism and on the rule of law. Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on social media after de Vries died that the country owed it to him to make sure justice was done. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote: "Investigative journalists are vital to our democracies."
The murder came only three months after another killing of a crime reporter in the EU. On 9 April 2021, Greek journalist Giorgos Karaivaz, who covered organised crime for Star Channel and ran the news site Bloko, was shot dead near his home in the Athens suburb of Alimos after returning from work. Investigators believed one group of people tracked his movements while another carried out the killing.
Together with the murders of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta in 2017 and Ján Kuciak in Slovakia in 2018, these cases have pushed press freedom groups and the EU to push for stronger protection for reporters who investigate crime and corruption. In the Netherlands, de Vries's killing led to a broader debate about protecting lawyers, witnesses and journalists from criminal networks that are willing to kill in public.
For many Dutch viewers, de Vries was less a celebrity than a stubborn reporter who spent four decades insisting that powerful criminals should face the law, and who kept going despite knowing the risks.
Sources: BBC News, 15 July 2021; DutchNews, 12 June 2024; Wikipedia: Murder of Peter R. de Vries; Wikipedia: Peter R. de Vries; Wikipedia: Ridouan Taghi; Wikipedia: Willem Holleeder; Wikipedia: Giorgos Karaivaz.
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