In yet another embarrassment for terror state of Pakistan, a Dutch court has sentenced a Pakistani man to 10 years imprisonment on Monday for plotting the assassination of Dutch MP Geert Wilders.
Reportedly, the Dutch court found the 27-year-old Junaid, guilty of planning the murder of Wilders, who announced a Prophet Mohammed cartoon competition.
Junaid, who refers to himself as a “peace-loving” man had travelled from France to Holland, to plot the murder of Dutch MP Wilders. During the trial, he had stated that he had only visited Holland to protest against the cartoon competition.
However, he was arrested in August 2018 at a train station in The Hague after he posted a film on Facebook, wherein he claimed he wanted to “send Wilders to hell” and urged others to help.
The Judges at The Hague’s district court has now found the man guilty of “planning a murder with a terrorist motive” and incitement to commit a terror attack.
The Judges ordered handed down a 10-year sentence handed to Pakistani man Junaid on Monday. Defending the harsher punishment to the accused, the court had said, if the attack had succeeded it would have struck at the country’s “political and constitutional” heart and “caused a wave of fear”.
“Wilders was exercising his freedom of speech. The suspect wanted to carry out an attack in one of the parliament buildings: the heart of Dutch democracy,” added the judges.
Dutch MP Geert Wilders had announced a plan to hold the cartoon competition last year, which had sparked mass demonstrations in Pakistan and a march from Lahore to Islamabad by some 10,000 protesters. The protestors had even demanded the Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan to cut diplomatic ties with the Netherlands.
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In June 2018, Wilders had announced Prophet Muhammad cartoon competition to be held at his party’s parliamentary offices. Later in August, he was forced to cancel the event after threats of terrorist violence became too significant.
The events were cancelled after thousands of supporters of TLP took to the streets of Pakistan calling for the expulsion of the Dutch ambassador and for diplomatic ties with the Netherlands to be severed. The Pakistani government, trying to take credit for the cancellation of the event, called it a “great moral victory for the Muslim Ummah” and a that “major crisis” had been averted.
Wilders is a known vocal critic of Islam He has been quoted in an interview as saying “I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Islam.” He said in the same interview, “Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology, the ideology of a retarded culture.”