Dutch intelligence service employee jailed for leaking secrets to radical islamists

Radio Netherlands
www.rnw.nl

For the first time since the Second World War an active member of staff of the Dutch intelligence service has been jailed for leaking state secrets. On Wednesday, a court in Rotterdam sentenced Outman ben Amar to four and a half years in prison.

Immediately after the sentence was announced, the lawyers acting for the accused said they would be filing an appeal. The Public Prosecutor's office is also considering a similar move on the grounds that the jail term was considerable lower than the one it had sought. The court decided on a lower sentence because it did not find that the charge of publication of state secrets had been proved.

Outman ben Amar was employed by the AIVD intelligence and security service as an interpreter and translator of Arabic and the Berber language, and - according to the court - he passed on information obtained from monitored conversations and other sources to persons who are suspected of belonging to radical Islamic groups.

One example concerns his having supplied information to a possible member of the so-called Hofstad group, to another suspect in a case being investigated by the AIVD, but also to more moderate groups including the Arab-European League, a political movement. He was arrested at the end of September 2004 at the AIVD's headquarters in Leidschendam, on the outskirts of The Hague. This in itself was a unique event in the history of the AIVD and the intelligence agencies which existed before it.

AIVD in full'Unsound'

Speaking through his defence team, Outman ben Amar - who has maintained that he is innocent throughout - made it known that he was 'deeply disappointed' by his conviction. Analysis of his handwriting and DNA material are believed to have provided the key evidence which led to his conviction. However, this is based on the information which has been made public. Much of the evidence against the interpreter-translator came from the AIVD's own information which, in turn, is classified as 'secret' and was not openly disclosed in the proceedings. This led one of the defence lawyers to comment that "the trial was totally unsound."

Nothing is known as yet about Outman ben Amar's motives for passing on information to third parties. He is regarded as a moderate Muslim, he is a university graduate and had no previous criminal record. Before joining the AIVD he had worked for the government's Immigration and Naturalisation Service and also run his own travel agency which specialised in trips to Morocco's mountainous Rif region. It's also unclear whether he can be regarded as having been a 'mole', i.e. someone who deliberately infiltrated the AIVD.

The only other known case of an intelligence officer being jailed dates back to 1981, although he had already quit the service. The man in question - a former employee of the Naval Intelligence Services - was sentenced to two years in prison for having attempted to sell state secrets to the Soviet Union.