Did police cover up death of 'Dutch Henry Nowak' over racist backlash fears? Tamar, 14, was hit by a car driven by an Iraqi refugee before being 'dumped in a roadside ditch'. Six years on, her mother is STILL fighting for justice

Published: 01:00, 15 June 2026 | Updated: 01:00, 15 June 2026 Seared into Trijntje’s memory is the click of the front door closing as her 14-year-old daughter, Tamar, crept out of the house in the middle of the night. It was just after 1am and Tamar had taken the key from her school bag to slip out of the family’s home in the idyllic island village of Marken, half an hour’s drive from Amsterdam. Two hours later the girl was dead, her body lying in a dyke beside a six-mile-long road leading to the nearby town of Monnickendam as her parents frantically searched for her. This week, Tamar’s tragic death gained attention across the world as a worrying backstory emerged of her redoubtable mother’s valiant six-year campaign to get to the truth of how the teenager died after being struck by a Mazda car on that warm night on July 25, 2020. The family and Dutch media were initially told by police that the Mazda’s driver was German. In fact, he was an Iraqi refugee who the next day hurriedly drove 280 miles back across the open border to his migrant accommodation in Marburg, Germany, before putting the Mazda, which had been extensively cleaned, for sale on an internet auction site. To add to the mystery, the driver (known as ‘Jamal T’ under Dutch privacy laws) disappeared along with the other three occupants of the car – also Iraqi refugees – in Germany. When, in 2021, Jamal was fined £1,200 in Holland for minor offences committed the previous year, including using his mobile phone while driving the Mazda around Marken that night, he did not pay the bill. The demand was returned to Dutch prosecutors from Germany because his address was ‘not known’. This week, Trijntje, 57, sat at the dining table of her home where she lives with her husband, whom we will call Jed for privacy reasons, and two sons born a few years before Tamar, as she told her story. It was just after 1am and Tamar had taken the key from her school bag to slip out of the family’s home in the idyllic island village of Marken Trijntje says: ‘My daughter was left in a roadside ditch like a dead animal. You wouldn’t wish that on anyone’ She is a senior civil servant at the City of Amsterdam’s municipal authority, a job she has remarkably held down even as she fought for the truth over her daughter’s death. She spoke to us exclusively as Tamar’s case hit international headlines amid allegations of a cover-up by Holland’s police and prosecution service to stop anti-racist sentiment against refugees in Holland. The authorities were anxious not to fuel the popularity of anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders and his hard-Right Party for Freedom, which won the 2023 election before a ruling coalition blocked it from power. In Britain, a similar case has garnered huge public attention. A bitter row is ongoing over Southampton student Henry Nowak, 18, who was handcuffed by police as he lay bleeding to death after being stabbed in the street last December. As his life drained away, his since-imprisoned Sikh assassin claimed the teenager had racially attacked him – a tale believed by the gullible first officers on the scene. Henry’s family was later told by police he had been the ‘aggressor’ and, until Henry’s father complained, the Hampshire force was preparing to put out an official statement endorsing this controversial view. This week, Tamar was described on social media as ‘the Dutch Henry Nowak’, after the world’s richest man Elon Musk entered the fray, calling the misidentifying of the Mazda occupants ‘homicidal empathy’. In other words, as is feared with Henry Nowak, a clear example of a killing being underplayed by woke authorities with an inbuilt sympathy for foreign-heritage suspects. Trijntje, meanwhile, explains that on the night before Tamar left, her father Jed had got up to go to the bathroom at 4am and saw his daughter in her bedroom looking at her laptop. Worried that the teenager was getting no rest, her parents switched off the wi-fi the following night, to the protest of their daughter. Trijntje says: ‘I did not want her to be on the internet looking at sites like TikTok while I was in bed. I wanted her to get her sleep. ‘Tamar hoped to be an air stewardess. She loved sport, she was very active and always wanted to be busy. The Covid lockdown meant she could not go to school from 8am to 4pm as normal. ‘Before the pandemic, there was only one laptop in the house, which was here on the dining table for everyone to share. We had given Tamar a small laptop because she was doing schoolwork from home and she began to use it in her bedroom during lockdown.’ Trijntje remembers how she begged the school to send extra lessons for Tamar in English and German during those empty days. ‘There was too much time left for her to fill’, she explains of the time when the laptop and social media sites became a central part of the teenager’s life as she struggled to cope, like so many schoolchildren across the world, with the isolating rules of lockdown. On the night Tamar went out, Trijntje remembers hearing the door shutting as she lay in bed trying to fall asleep. She woke up Jed and told him their daughter had left the house. ‘But we could not lock her in as though we were a prison. That night she was making a statement. She was 14 – an age when you want to start asserting independence.’ The couple were frantically worried. Trijntje realised immediately that Tamar had taken the key from her school bag to unlock the door. ‘I went out on my bike to find her. My husband took the car and his bike to search, too. ‘But we never saw her alive again. We think she was walking normally, not running.’ Trijntje alerted the police, who started to search as well. ‘The place she was found by police was only three miles from our village.’ Her mother now theorises that Tamar was sitting beside the road hoping that her father would come to pick her up when she was hit by the Mazda. ‘The driver knows the truth. He was not meant to be in Holland but was here illegally – because, as a refugee to Germany, he was not meant to leave that country.’ Yet exactly what happened that night is still a mystery. The police found Tamar’s body soon after 3am lying in a dyke, in an unusual position for a car-crash victim. Her arms were above her head and her legs were extended straight out and together ‘as if she had been laid out’, said an officer at the scene. A bitter row is ongoing over Southampton student Henry Nowak, 18, who was handcuffed by police as he lay bleeding to death This week, as Musk entered the arena, Trijntje begged him for help in a tweet she then later deleted An independent traffic-accident expert hired by the family’s lawyer, Sebas Diekstra, concluded Tamar had been moved. He said: ‘You can clearly see that there is an angle to the victim’s body [when it was found]. We analyse hundreds of accidents and that angle could not have been the result of a collision. ‘The expert’s findings show that the final position of Tamar’s body cannot be explained by the collision itself... one must assume that her body was dragged or moved after the collision.’ The vital report led to a police reconstruction. This surmised that the occupants of the Mazda had a ‘brief opportunity’ to drag Tamar’s body off the road and out of sight – although the time frame was ‘very tight’ before an unidentified car passed the scene, followed closely by Jed as he searched for his missing daughter. Could it be that the Iraqis hoped to hide Tamar’s body so they could escape punishment? As for Trijntje, she said previously: ‘It is crystal-clear that Tamar was simply thrown into the ditch and that those men had every reason to flee.’ She insisted to us this week: ‘It was impossible for her to move herself off the road because of her injuries.’ However, to add to this distressing conundrum, no DNA from the Iraqi group has ever been discovered on Tamar’s body. As the questions continue to mount up, Anis Boujami, Jamal’s lawyer, has insisted his client did not see the teenager, and ‘therefore, did not touch her’. Jamal himself told police he thought his car had hit a pothole, a road sign or a wild animal. A few years after Tamar’s death, Trijntje and the family’s lawyer asked judges to reconsider the decision not to prosecute Jamal for leaving the scene of an accident, and other more serious charges. This led to a vital police reappraisal of the collision and, at the end of this month, the Iraqi, now 33, is due in court before a judge to answer charges of causing a death by reckless driving. Crucial new evidence on why the teenager’s body ended up off the main road and in a ditch will be heard from witnesses, including her mother. And a number of Marken residents have come forward with CCTV footage of the Mazda’s movements that night, providing fresh information on the girl’s last moments. The footage shows that just after 3am – about the time police found Tamar’s body – the Mazda was seen in a Marken car park where some of the occupants got out, apparently to look for any visible damage to the front of the vehicle. They appeared to conclude there was none, and left for Germany after what Jamal told police was a ‘brief camping holiday’ in Holland. Trijntje has been vocal about what she views as deceit by the Dutch justice system. She has said in YouTube interviews: ‘The lying began right from the start. ‘We were first told that it was a “German” man [driving the Mazda]. Later we were informed that the four in the car were refugees who had sought asylum in Germany. ‘When I challenged the police, they said they had known about their true identities earlier. The explanation I was given was that the authorities wanted to avoid the “Wilders effect”.’ Although she maintains her composure throughout our interview, Trijntje is obviously deeply angry. This week, as Musk entered the arena, she begged him for help in a tweet she then deleted. She is now reluctant to comment on the Tesla billionaire’s mention of ‘homicidal empathy’, sweeping my inquiries aside. Dressed in an electric blue silk designer jumpsuit, she chooses her words carefully. Nevertheless, they expose a culture of cover-up for political expediency by the Dutch authorities who called the suspects German instead of Iraqi. In the dining room, filled with family photos, is a last picture of Tamar, smiling in white shorts under a bright sunny sky. It was taken in Portugal on a family holiday the week before she died. It is a poignant image of a teenage girl with her whole life in front of her. But, as Trijntje says: ‘My daughter was left in a roadside ditch like a dead animal. You wouldn’t wish that on anyone.’ No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. 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