Dutch investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries dies after shooting

AMSTERDAM — A well-known Dutch crime reporter was shot in the head on Tuesday night after leaving a TV studio in the center of Amsterdam, the police said.

Videos on social media showed Peter R. de Vries, 64, lying on the street with blood streaming from his face. “He is still alive,” a bystander can be heard saying. The police wrote on Twitter that he was “seriously injured” and had been transported to the hospital.

Mr. de Vries, who has long been a fixture in the Netherlands for solving cold cases and hosting his own televised crime show for nearly two decades, has said he regularly received death threats.

The news of Mr. de Vries’s shooting was met in the Netherlands with shock. “Unbelievable,” Thomas Bruning, the secretary of a Dutch association for journalists, wrote on Twitter. “This hits journalism right in the face.”

Amsterdam — as well as other Dutch cities — has been the scene of multiple shootings over the past decade, in which criminals have targeted either each other or those interfering in their crimes. The nearby port of Rotterdam is one of the key gateways for importing cocaine into Europe, and the country is a leader in the illegal production of amphetamines and crystal meth.

Over the past year, Mr. de Vries, who is also the director of a law office, had been an adviser to a key witness in a trial over multiple killings allegedly ordered by a crime organization. Ridouan Taghi, accused of being the gang’s leader, is a Dutch-Moroccan, who was arrested in Dubai in 2019 and is the prime defendant in the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridouan_Taghi

After the shooting, Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Ferdinand Grapperhaus, the justice minister, held an emergency meeting with security authorities. This was “an attack on a brave journalist and with that an attack on free journalism,” Mr. Rutte said.

The police said they had arrested three people, one of whom could be the “possible gunman,” but didn’t provide any more information about the suspects. The police did not comment on a motive.

Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, called Mr. de Vries “a national hero for all of us,” at a news conference, describing the attack as a “brutish, cowardly crime.” She added that Mr. de Vries was “fighting for his life.”

“Normally those criminals kill each other, but now they are murdering lawyers and journalists,” said Minke Heino, who passed by the scene of the crime Tuesday night on her red bicycle. “They are acting with impunity. This is next level.”

Mr. de Vries is a regular on talk shows and has written numerous books, including one about the 1983 kidnapping of the Dutch beer magnate Freddy Heineken. Some of Mr. de Vries’s prominent cases include the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, and a decades-long investigation into the rape and murder of an 11-year-old boy.