Cemil Önal, 41, was shot in the afternoon of Thursday 1er May on the highly frequented terrace of a hotel in Rijswijk, in the suburbs of southeast of The Hague. A man dressed in black was, according to witnesses, calmly directed towards him to bring him down several bullets before fleeing. Cemil Önal had previously been imprisoned for sixteen months in Alphen Aan Den Rijn prison, Holland-Meridional, at the request of the Turkish authorities who accused him of being the instigator of the liquidation of the chief of the Cypriote Turkish mafia Halil Falyali and his driver, in 2022.
He would have been both the bodyguard and the accountant of this mafia who, he said, enjoined him to pay money to personalities linked to the AKP, the Party of Justice and Development, to power in Turkey, and to nationalist leaders of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (RTCN), under an international embargo and only recognized by Ankara. He spoke of monthly amounts of $ 15 million.
Ankara claimed his extradition in 2023, a measure he was fighting by denying any involvement in the double murder and claiming that he would not be entitled to a fair trial if he was tried in his country. He had therefore submitted an asylum request to the Netherlands, rejected for the first time in March 2024, and a second time in October of the same year. However, the Minister of Justice had not yet decided to extradite him.
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