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A suspect in a European multinational organized crime investigation that uncovered a makeshift prison and torture chamber was previously acquitted of a high-profile murder in Wellington in 1999, according to Dutch media reports.
Nine arrests were made after Dutch police discovered seven shipping containers turned into a makeshift prison and a soundproof “torture chamber”, complete with a dentist’s chair and tools such as tweezers, scalpels and handcuffs.
The June discovery in Wouwse Plantage, a small village in the south-west of the Netherlands, further exposed the increasingly violent underworld of the Dutch gangs and their large-scale drug production and trafficking.
William Jan H Haanstra, 43, has been named as one of the nine arrested and identified by the Dutch magazine. Panorama as the prime suspect in the unsolved murder of Terri King, whose body was found in the Tararua Ranges in April 1999.
Dutch Police via AP
Dutch police found a dentist chair equipped with restraint systems in one of seven shipping containers that had been converted into a provisional prison and a soundproofed “torture chamber”.
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In 1999, Haanstra was 22 years old and living in Miramar with his family, who had emigrated to New Zealand from Holland.
He was charged with King’s murder, but was acquitted by a jury after a two-month trial in Wellington High Court. At the time, the trial highlighted the drug scene in the capital.
King, 31, known most of his life by his adopted name, Trevor Raymond Heath, was shot, execution-style, in the back of the head while at Mt Holdsworth in the Tararua Ranges.
Police alleged that King, who was well known on the Wellington drug and party scene, had been seen going into the mountains with Haanstra in search of a buried cache of MDMA, also known as ecstasy.
Two months later, a hunter stumbled upon his decomposing body, which showed a severe head wound.
Terri King, known for most of his life as Trevor Heath, was murdered, execution style, at the Tararua Ranges in Wellington in 1999. No one was convicted of his murder.
No murder weapon was found and it took six months before Haanstra, an unemployed model, was arrested and charged for the death.
In 2002, Coroner Jock Kershaw ruled that King’s killer was “unknown.”
In 2010, a police officer involved in the trial, Detective Sergeant Ross Levy, said The Dominion Post after retiring, Haanstra “was not found innocent, he was not found guilty”, and the police were not looking for anyone else in connection with King’s murder.
In PanoramaDutch journalist Eric Slot alleged that Haanstra was one of nine arrested in June, after a joint operation by Dutch and French police to infiltrate an encrypted phone system, EncroChat.
The BBC reported that British and Dutch police had already arrested hundreds of suspects based on the encrypted messages, seizing more than 8,000 kilograms of cocaine, 1,200 kilograms of crystalline methamphetamine and dozens of firearms, and dismantling 19 synthetic drug laboratories.
After intercepting millions of messages, the police found the containers in April at Wouwse Plantage, near the Belgian border, and placed them under observation. The police discovered that several men worked on them almost every day.
Craig Simcox / Evening Post
William Jan Haanstra comes to court in 2000. He was the prime suspect in Terri King’s murder, but a jury found him not guilty.
Data from the encrypted phone network included photographs of the container and the dentist’s chair, with belts attached to the arm and foot supports.
The messages called the warehouse the “treatment room” and the “ebi”, a reference to a Dutch maximum security prison.
The messages also revealed identities of potential victims, who were tipped off and went into hiding, Dutch police said.
Slot reported that Haanstra was also a suspect in the disappearance and alleged murder of a Dutchman, Remco van der Torre, in 2008.
Dutch Police via AP
Video footage from Dutch police made international headlines in June, showing heavily armed officers raiding sea containers.
Police believe that van der Torre wanted to sell 20 kg of weed and had invited people to his home before disappearing.
“Traces of blood were found in his house and someone had tried to set it on fire,” said Slot.
Haanstra was arrested, along with another man, but both were released for lack of evidence.
