The Hague:
Dutch prosecutors said on Wednesday they have tried two Pakistani nationals for inciting the murder of anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders, and asked Islamabad for legal help in the case.
Judges sentenced Pakistani cricketer Khalid Latif to 12 years behind bars in September last year for urging people to kill Wilders after the incendiary lawmaker tried to organize a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
The Public Prosecution Service said it was prosecuting two Pakistani nationals, one a religious leader, 55, and one a political leader, 29, “who called on their supporters to kill a Dutch parliamentarian.”
“This happened both during meetings and on social media via video and text messages,” the statement said.
The religious leader is said to have called for Wilders' murder because his followers would be “rewarded in the afterlife”, while the political leader said that since Latif's conviction it was “up to his own followers to carry out the task”.
The two men will stand trial on September 2 in a high-security courthouse near Schiphol Airport.
Dutch authorities have asked Islamabad for legal assistance in interrogating the suspects and issuing summons to appear in court.
However, there is no mutual legal assistance treaty with Pakistan and it seems unlikely that the two men will ever appear in the dock.
Geert Wilders posted two names on X, formerly Twitter, but prosecutors did not mention the names of the suspects for privacy reasons.
The names could not be independently verified by AFP.
“I hope they are extradited, convicted and imprisoned!” Wilders said.
The Dutch authorities have tried in vain to question Latif about the case and requested legal assistance from Pakistan, also without success.
Wilders canceled the cartoon competition after protests broke out in Pakistan and he was flooded with death threats. He has been under state protection 24 hours a day since 2004.
In the Netherlands, the plan to organize the competition was widely criticized, with politicians, local media and ordinary citizens decrying the idea as unnecessarily antagonizing Muslims.
But the call to kill Wilders seemed to resonate: a Pakistani man was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2019 for plotting his murder in the aftermath of the canceled match.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)