‘Rida was completely trapped’

With every murder, the death of the Moroccan hitman came a little closer

Profile of Rida Bennajem by Wouter Laumans & Marijn Schrijver

There is a full blown war going on in the Moroccan underworld in Amsterdam. Very young criminals kill each other at an alarming rate. The latest victim is 21-year old Rida Bennajem. In just a few years, he has worked his way up from a ruffian from the western part of Amsterdam to one of the most wanted criminals of the Netherlands. This is his story.

“I heard arguing and shouting. Then I heard someone yell: ‘Come on! Come on!,’ and then I heard eight or so shots.” At first she thought it was fireworks, she says. When the local girl then looks out of the window, she sees two men walking calmly away. A third man is bleeding heavily and lying on the pavement of the Comeniusstraat in the Amsterdam suburb of Slotervaart. Although paramedics try and reanimate him, he dies of his injuries later that Saturday night.

When police officers take a closer look at the victim, they do not recognize him immediately, as he has been shot in the head at close range. His hair is longer than on the photographs the police has distributed. But it is him, undeniably. Rida Bennajem, the young robber from the Western part of Amsterdam.

When this edition appears on March 27th, 2012, Rida would have been 22.

Now, ten days before his birthday, he is lying in a pool of blood: one of the most wanted gangsters in the Netherlands. The 21-year old made a rapid career in heavy crime. As such he has the dubious honour of being the youngest person on the Dutch list of most wanted persons ever. The police has been looking for him feverishly, as he was involved in a violent robbery in Leiden. Bennajem’s name also comes up in other police investigations. Investigations into revenge killings in the Moroccan underworld.

“Rida was trapped,” says an anonymous source who is familiar with the goings on in the Moroccan underworld when asked why Rida stayed in Amsterdam even though the police was looking for him. Instead of fleeing to Morocco or go into hiding in another town, he seems to have stayed put in the area he grew up in: the Amsterdam neighbourhood of Bos en Lommer.

Just go inside

“Come with me,” says a Moroccan man. Around forty hours after Rida’s death we are walking around the neighbourhood he grew up in. “This is his house. Go inside. Yes, just go. His brothers and sisters speak Dutch.”

The front door to the building is open. A group of older black-clad Muslim women is just coming out of the house. Is it true that Rida Bennajem lived here? “Yes. Upstairs. You can go upstairs, to the third floor,” one of the women says. Are they sure his family wants journalists in their house now? “Yes. It’s fine. Third floor. Just go op. Third floor,” the ladies chirp in unison. The door upstairs is also open. Around ten pairs of shoes are neatly displayed at the threshold. In the kitchen a women is busy cooking. There is a large pan on the stove. There will be many more visitors today. A young brunette comes to the door. “Yes, Rida lived here,” she says. This girl does seem to understand that it is strange to invite journalists at a wake for a deceased gangster, and we apologize.

Outside, two detectives of the Major Investigation Team are just pulling up in their car. They go inside, with a folder under their arms. They too have a lot of questions.

Rida Bennajem’s life starts off reasonably stable. He grows up in the Gulden Winckelstraat, around the corner from the Bos en Lommer-square in the western part of Amsterdam. It’s a drab street with four story apartment buildings and many satellite dishes on the balconies.

When he walks out the door, he can see his elementary school and a little further down, the mosque. There is not much for him outside the 250 meter radius around his house. “He was a boisterous child,” one of the nursery teachers of the local state school remembers. That morning, Rida’s liquidation has been talked about endlessly in the staff room. Only ten years earlier a young Rida ran around the school’s playground. “This hits us very hard,” she says. “Nobody raises a kid to end up like this.”

Rida’s bloody death is not only a topic of discussion among the teachers, the mothers bringing their children to school too are talking about only that. Various stories are going round. It is said he was involved in the double murder in the neighbourhood of Staatsliedenbuurt in the western part of Amsterdam in late December, when another boy from that area was also shot dead.

A little further down the street there is a group of thirty-something men with beards in front of the Badr-mosque. “No, we do not know him. He never came here,” they claim. ‘We probably passed him in the street now and then, but we only know his face from tv.” One of them does know Rida’s parents’ house was watched by the police day and night.

It is easy to say that Rida could have done very different things in his life. After all, a career as a moped criminal is pretty obvious here. But it is not only this area. Rida comes from a broken home, has learning difficulties and does not always get along with the other kids. After elementary school, Rida goes to a special needs school for a while in 2005. After a short time there, he is admitted to Altra College, a school for students who have difficulties dealing with their peers, teachers or parents, or who are struggling with mental problems.

Go your own way

As a teenager, Rida joins the ‘Gulden Winckelpark-group’, a party of young troublemakers, who have been named by the police after their favourite hang-out. Other groups are the ‘Bestevaer-group’ and the ‘Chassé-group’ in the western part of Amsterdam.

These are not rival gangs, but ordinary Moroccan boys from the neighbourhood who have nothing better to do at night than gulping down energy drinks on the streets. One youngster goes to school, another robs late night shops at knifepoint and yet another one again is busy with his own company. Rida is out on the street a lot. When he plays football, this rather quiet boy lights up. With his hands casually in his pockets he is able to keep the ball in the air for long stretches of time, to the great thrill of the younger boys on the square. He does not like school at all. He works at a local street market for a while, but seems to be doing his own thing more and more. He associates with the bad boys who commit robberies or deal drugs. He adopts the wide posture of the bad guys from the underworld; chest expanded and chin up high. And he has a certain look in his eyes. A look that says: no-one can touch me. This gives him a certain standing in the area. “He was a real soldier. A guy with balls. Everyone knew that,” a neighbour recalls.

When he is not with his mates on the streets, young Rida can often be found in the community centre Connect, where social workers try and keep youngsters on the straight and narrow by offering activities like watching films. Connect was founded by Said Bensellam, who was voted Amsterdam Citizen of the Year 2006. He remembers Rida, but does not give away much about him. “The boys grow up and by the time they are sixteen or seventeen they go their own way. What has happened is terrifying, of course.”

Rida is the second murder victim in a short time that comes very close for Connect. Said el Yazidi, one of the victims of the shooting in the Staatsliedenbuurt on December 29, came there often too. He was good friends with Rida, even. Said Bensellam: “Two boys from this area have died a tragic death. That really hits home hard. At a certain moment boys like Rida and Said become lads, and you lose them, you know. You don’t just die, right?”

Stabber

As a young boy Rida Bennajem gets into trouble with the police. When asked how they have come into possession of a mugshot of a boy who the police are still looking for, a spokesman answers: “He had been detained before.” It is not clear what his earlier offences were. Rida is a “stabber”, that much they know in Bos en Lommer. He is small (just over 5 foot 6) and scrawny. He cannot survive on his fists alone, and therefore he relies on knives as a teenager. Even at a young age he has already stabbed several people, we hear. And it doesn’t take long before he gets hold of a gun. One of the first bullets Rida fires makes the national headlines straight away. It happens on June 6, 2011, in his own street, less than 60 yards from his own front door. Rida gets into a fight with a local boy. Rida walks back home, goes upstairs en returns with a gun in his hands. “No, not here on the street!” someone yells. But Rida is angry and shoots immediately. The bullet enters the lower leg of his victim. “The shooter is thought to be known locally. He fled on foot and is still on the run” is the last thing the media report on the case.

Less than six months later, Rida is standing in front of a jeweller’s in Leiden, Has Gold. This is not his first robbery, but it will change his life forever. It is midday, on January 11, 2012. Rida enters the shop with two accomplices. It is Rida’s task to hold the jeweller at gun point. The other two fill their bags with jewellery and they are back outside within minutes. But then all goes wrong. The jeweller sets off in pursuit of the robbers. The three of them sprint towards the getaway moped, but its engine refuses to start. As the jeweller approaches, the boys shoot at him. In the meantime, the police arrive and Rida shoots at the policemen as well.

All bullets, however, miss their target. The threesome then flees on foot, in separate directions. Boys from Amsterdam-West still tell each other the story of how Rida succeeded in shaking off the policemen by going into a McDonald’s where he ordered fries and stayed put for a while.

The robbery is a complete disaster. Rida’s accomplices, Haci Y. and Issam E. are soon caught, and are sentenced to twelve and eight years imprisonment respectively. Most of the loot is recovered by the police, who, on the basis of telephone records, know that Bennajem was involved in the robbery. And this is how Rida’s face has come to be shown on television, in the Dutch version of Crimewatch. “Violent and unpredictable,” is what the police call him. They offer a reward of 5,000 euros for the first person to grass on Rida. He also ends up on the national list of most wanted persons.

Hitman

By April, Rida has still managed to keep out of the hands of the police, but his money is running out. The following stories come from the streets of Bos en Lommer, where facts and rumours are completed, improved and updated like a Wikipedia page type Moroccan grapevine. What follows next is the story how it is often told on the streets. The Moroccan hitman Redouan Boutaka has to die. There is a price on his head. Rida is approached by members from the organised crime, recruited, rather; for the murder. “You are trapped, anyway,” he is told. Rida is persuaded and on the evening of Sunday 22 April, he calmly walks into a shisha bar in the Van Woustraat in Amsterdam. He goes downstairs, where Boutaka is sitting with his friends, walks up to the victim and pumps several bullets in his body, with tens of witnesses looking on.

Rida has become a foot soldier for the big boys, the story goes. The police have never found the shooter in the café and do not say whether Rida is a suspect. The description of the suspect the police circulates, does match Rida’s however: Moroccan, remarkably small (between 5'3" en 5'7") and slight. Shortly after the liquidation in the shisha bar, the police also put Rida on a list of wanted persons of Interpol. Rida is a hitman, a killer and “most wanted”. For his next assignment he has to travel to Antwerp. He has been given a role in a conflict over 200 kilos of cocaine, between the renowned Amsterdam criminal Gwenette M. and “Ben”, the target of the shooting in the Staatsliedenbuurt. Allegedly, Rida pockets around 30,000 euros from “Ben” to kill Najib Bouhbouh, one of Gwenette’s boys. And so it happens. On October 18 of that same year, in broad daylight, Bouhbouh receives two bullets in the head and another two in the chest, in front of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Antwerp.

On 29 December, “Ben” himself is the target of a revenge killing in the western part of Amsterdam. “Ben” flees, but the nephews Youssef Lkhorf and Said el Yazidi are killed. Rida’s name is mentioned everywhere; it is not only the mothers at the playground of his old elementary school that speculate on his involvement. Two conflicting stories are going round in Bos en Lommer. The first, a slightly older story, goes as follows: Rida is the one who lured the black Range Rover with “Ben”, Said, Youssef and a fourth, blonde passenger in it to the place of the liquidation on 29 December. The foursome have no idea there are foot soldiers waiting for them with AK-47s at the ready. Rida takes “Ben” into an alley where they talk for a while, and when the target gets back into the Range Rover, Rida flees.

Moments later a heavy burst of gunfire is heard. Rida has defected and does not only lure “Ben” into a trap, but by doing so, also signs the death warrant of his good friend Said. On the streets it is suggested that Rida felt he had to wait too long for his reward for the liquidation in Antwerp. This version is not accepted by many of the boys in the western parts of Amsterdam, however. As it happens, Said and Rida really were very good friends, so Rida could never have done it, they argue. They oppose the story as it can be read on crime blogs. Rida was in fact there during the shooting incident of December 29, they say, but it was actually him who was sitting in the Range Rover with his good friend. The fourth, so far unknown, passenger is Rida, they claim. In order to be able to walk the streets incognito, he was wearing a blonde wig, or he had died his hair. Just like “Ben,” the blonde man succeeds in escaping. When a panicking “Ben” jumps in the water and later climbs out “dazed and confused”, it is Rida who helps him flee.

Days are numbered

Whatever the story, after the violence of December 29, Rida’s days seem numbered.

In Bos en Lommer more murders are expected and it would not surprise anyone if Rida is next. The assignment to kill Rida could have come from several directions. Rida only had a few confidants left, and was sought by the police internationally and was not safe in the criminal underworld anymore either. That is something that can happen to old hands, but now that a new generation has stood up in the world of organised crime, also to a 21-year old Moroccan boy. His family is suffering. Someone who knows the family well: “His mother dreamt he would be put behind bars, so she would at least know he was alive.”

That is the story one also hears on the street: if only he had turned himself in after the robbery in Leiden. That would have meant he would have been released when he was in his thirties. Then he could have made something of his life, instead of ending up on a cemetery in the north of Morocco, at the age of 21.

For more information about Wouter Laumans, Marijn Schrijver and MOCRO MAFFIA please visit the Lebowski Agency website.