LETTER FROM BENELUX
With her gothic makeup, her always black dresses and her humor of the same shade, lawyer Inez Weski is an icon of the Dutch courtrooms, capable, as she did in 2018, of pleading for two days to defend an accused.
On April 21, 2023, when she had just sold her Rotterdam study, this very media figure saw a police squad arrive at her home. She does not have time to feed her cats and is taken to an underground dungeon, almost completely deprived of light and whose location she still does not know today. At 69, after forty-five years in the profession, one of the most famous lawyers in the kingdom is suspected of participating in a criminal organization. And not just any: the all-powerful Mocro Maffia, the umbrella of various Moroccan criminal organizations specializing in cocaine trafficking and led by the bloodthirsty Ridouan Taghi, 46 years old.
Inez Weski was, at the time, the lawyer of the gangster, extradited in 2019 from Dubai to the Netherlands, a defense which she gave up shortly after being arrested. An interminable trial curiously called “Marengo” – by virtue of the random choice of a name by a computer, according to the custom of Dutch justice – was brought against Mr. Taghi and sixteen of his associates. The hearings ended in February 2024, with the life sentence of the head of the network, found guilty in particular of five assassinations and two assassination attempts. The list of score-settling attributed to “Mocro” is much longer and includes the names of a lawyer, Derk Wiersum, and an investigative journalist, Peter R. de Vries.
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Detention in a “bunker”
Mme Weski is suspected of having helped her client send messages while she was the only one authorized to meet him in his prison, which is in principle ultra-secure. The discovery by the police of the Sky ECC network, according to the prosecution, provided evidence to incriminate the lawyer, who also allegedly communicated confidential elements of the investigation file to Mr. Taghi. Released after forty-one days, Mme Weski now awaits his trial date.
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And if she admits to having thought, for a time, of ending her life ” in a cave “, she got back on track. There was obviously no question for this woman experienced in the biggest criminal cases of leaving the field open to the accusation. Friday April 19, she published a book written in the greatest secrecy: Het geluid van de style (“the sound of silence”, Lux editions, untranslated), account of his detention in the “bunker” where, she said, she went around in circles “like a Siberian tiger”. She claims that some of her “persecutors”Who knew of her health problems, would not have taken a dim view of her dying in this anonymous place where, according to her, she had the beginnings of a coma.
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