Photographs found on a phone showing the torture of a woman believed to be a Moroccan-Dutch drug smuggler nicknamed the Godmother of the Coke have been added to the prosecution’s evidence against a suspected drug kingpin in his trial in Amsterdam for multiple murders.
Three disturbing images of a woman who bears a close resemblance to Naima Jillal, who disappeared in 2019, were reportedly found on a BlackBerry when Ridouan Taghi was arrested three years ago in Dubai.
According to Het Parool, a Dutch newspaper, the pictures have recently been added to the evidence against Taghi in the so-called Marengo case, in which he and 16 others are accused of organising six murders between 2015 and 2017.
Speaking to Het Parool, Taghi’s lawyer, Inez Weski, said the prosecution had no basis on which to link the phone or the gruesome images to Taghi, a Moroccan-Dutch national who was the Netherlands’ most wanted man before his arrest.
She said: “It cannot be stated that this phone can be linked to my client. So that link and origin are not fixed. It has been reported in the media before that such photos were going around. Moreover, all this has nothing to do with the alleged facts. It is very remarkable that this has been brought out in this way.”
The long-running Marengo trial, the name of which was picked randomly by a computer, has revealed the extraordinary scale and severity of the violence around the narcotics gangs operating in the Netherlands.
It has also been marked by the murder of figures linked to the prosecution’s chief witness, a former gang member turned informant, called Nabil B.
The witness’s brother was murdered in 2018, and a separate trial of three men suspected of shooting dead his former lawyer Derk Wiersum began last year. Nabil B’s sometime spokesperson, the journalist Peter R de Vries, was killed on the streets of Amsterdam in 2021.
When Taghi was arrested in 2019 in Dubai, he was reportedly described by the city’s police chief as “one of the world’s most dangerous and wanted men”.
Jillal, who was 54 when she disappeared, was known as the Godmother of the Coke or Tante Jillal (Aunt Jillal) in the criminal underworld. She was last seen getting into a car near her home on Gustav Mahlerlaan in Amsterdam at about 9.30pm on Sunday 20 October 2019 but her family said she had not been seen or heard of since.
