Court jails Nijmegen teen’s ‘heinous’ killers

26 May 2004

AMSTERDAM — A court has jailed a man for 11 years for his role in the killing of Nijmegen schoolgirl Maja Bradaric last year. A co-defendant was jailed for eight years. Maja was strangled and then her body was dumped and set alight.

The court imposed the 11-year term on Ferdi O., 19, and sentenced Goran M., 18, to eight years with compulsory TBS psychiatric detention.

Experts at the Pieter Baan assessment centre described M. as being of “diminished accountability” and in need of long-term treatment.

A third defendant, Goran P., 16, was jailed for three years, with six months suspended for being an accessory to murder.  

The presiding Arnhem Court judge said the murder was carried out with “cold-blooded orientation” and “heinous contempt” for the victim.

The prosecutor had sought a 12-year sentence for Goran M., a 15-year sentence for Ferdi O. while Goran P. had faced a six-year jail term.

Maja’s murder shocked the Netherlands as there did not seem to be a clear motive for the killing. The victim’s and defendants are of Bosnian descent and moved to the Netherlands several years ago.

A defence lawyer for Goran P. said the other two had admitted they wanted to kill Maja in revenge for a remark her parents had allegedly made in Bosnia to M’s parents about the death of his sister.

It had also been suggested the killers had been brutalised by witnessed atrocities during the Bosnian-Serb conflict in the 1990s.

The court heard that on the evening of 17 November last year, Maja was lured into the car of the mother of 18-year-old Ferdi O. after her close friend, Nina K., 15 — the girlfriend of main suspect 18-year-old Goran M. — had unwittingly arranged the meeting without knowing the suspects’ intentions. O. was driving the car.

Maja’s friend and possibly ex-boyfriend Goran P. was also in the car when Goran M. strangled Maja, first with his hands and then with a rope. P. had allegedly not known the murder would take place before agreeing to get in the car.

After Maja’s death, the three male youths then drove to swampy land between the towns of Bemmel and Lent, where the main suspects doused the victim’s body in petrol and set it alight.

M. and O. were accused of plotting and planning the murder and both of them confessed.

[Copyright Expatica News 2004]

Subject: Dutch news