This is a perjury charge I filed against The Apostelhoeve Winery. The winemaker’s wife emerged as crown witness in the story about a wild west chase in the local elementary school. Written at the Bisschopsingel 53 police station.
The story actually goes back to 9 juli 2000 when my father was brought to the Weert hospital around midnight with a heavy heart attack. Cardiologist Huub Penn decided to stay in bed and transfer duties to an intern. Damage to the heart increased, my father was brought to a heart center later that week, but died of complications of emergency surgery.
I worked at the Weert hospital and decided to go to the bottom of this, with the help of some colleagues and my family. In 2002 we published the result online: medical files fraud. Using the internet as a court of public opinion, however, was not appreciated. Every word we wrote was corroborated by documents, but it was that very evidence that nearly got my family pushed over the edge.
March 2004. I launched the WGBO.nl website about patients’ rights. A few months later my mother received a phone call from the Weert police. Her car was ”seen at a kitchen manufacturer in Venlo”. She ”hadn’t paid for a new kitchen”, the officer on the other side of the line told her.
My mom of course has never been anywhere near a kitchen store in Venlo. We were flabbergasted, told the officer to stop intimidating her. It was a phone call with a message that we couldn’t immediately read at the time. It was the first in a string of false accusations.
Although strictly speaking it was the second.
It was a Sunday morning, May 2003. My brother and his wife were approaching the city limits of Weert as a police van pulled them over: “you were not wearing a seatbelt”, the officer said. Since it was blatantly obvious they did wear one, my brother demanded an explanation. The officer claimed he saw them buckling up while driving. Theo thought he had landed in the Twilight Zone and literally told the officer he was talking a load of nonsense. That was just enough ground to take him in and lock him up for two hours in a cell, for “insult”.
A while later the Maastricht police started writing down some incendiary rhetoric in so-called confidential mutation forms. Situated at the Wolder elementary school, where my brother’s son went to third grade: ”yearslong troublemaking”.
Theo and his wife, journalist Corinne Aquarius, had witnessed a few unsettling occurrences the first school months involving the janitor, who was bossing around the teachers with his feet on the table.
Principal notified. Again, not appreciated. Not only did he ignore the observations, – “we never receive complaints” – he took a stance against what he felt was intrusion. Reality is that this is a public school and the couple simply continued to document the things they saw here.
But while the children in 3rd grade were doing their writing exercises in the classroom opposite the principal’s office, it just so happened that Mr. Quaedackers was phoning and emailing with officers at the Bisschopsingel Bureau.
The 28th of September 2006: officer Boudewijn Mayeur knocks on the door of that office around 8:30 a.m, invited for a chat. By no means does he have any desire to assess the matter with an objective eye.
Quaedackers shows him an e-mail he received 25 August, in which the parents asked for the credentials of his staff. A completely legitimate question, but the school indeed felt it like an acute threat, to its existence. And consequently sent the parents a notification; that they’re both suspended for the remainder of the school year!
An impulse decision and a ridiculous one at that, something the board itself also quickly realized. Corinne and Theo walk in and out just the same, not impressed. At the station, the word has become “trespassing”.
Officer Mayeur allows the principal to gratuitously throw in a few words like ”threats in emails”. And labels the documents with HKS code 400: drug dealer.
School board chairman is Frans Groutars, active member of the local CDA and notary public. His right hand in the board is MU law professor Malva Driessen. At the faculty, she works with Ria Wolleswinkel, school board advisor. Law faculty member Dorothé Garé is hired as the school’s lawyer.
Driessen is a judge at the Maastricht Court. Where Annemarie Penn, wife of cardiologist (cousin) Olaf, is vice president. The Court is located in the same building as the DA’s office. Same address, Sint Annadal 1. And as abstract as it sounds, the documents that surfaced are very real and a reconstruction shows how the local authorities together with school staff worked towards a specific situation.
October 24th 2006, two policemen show up at the entrance of the school. They halt my brother, take out the handcuffs and try to illicit a violent response. With the purpose of making those prefabricated accusations come ‘true’. Officer Ten Brink already wrote down that he ”wouldn’t rule out the use of violence irrespective of the presence of large group of small children”.
They are a 100% ready to draw their gun. The police wrote down their own crime, not knowing that this document would be published on the internet one day, for the whole world to see. The plan goes awry, because we are a non violent platform. Corinne is filming the scene with her mobile camera. The cops immediately back down.
Officers Ten Brink & Partouns
26 October. At 9 a.m. Theo is on the phone with the secretary of the Minister of Education in The Hague and and tries to convince him to hand her the footage. Ultimately it takes six or seven callbacks, 3 hours on the phone (of which 2 on hold). Around noon it’s lying on her desk.
Not known at the time is the fact that Minister Maria van der Hoeven lives in Maastricht herself, a stone’s throw from the school, same neighbourhood. Her stepson is a detective at the Bisschopsingel bureau. There confidential mutation form 2006146376-1 is opened: “assault of a teacher committed by father of the school.”
The family is still unaware what’s going on behind the scenes, but in and around the classroom are plenty of signals for action. November 1st they inform Chief of Police Velings by e-mail. Turns out he doesn’t have any clue what’s going on in his own building. He pulls all that’s produced in the backrooms to the surface. And that is close, because plans for a second strike were already in the making, this time at the couple’s front door.
That same day, Annemarie Penn moves to the position of DA.
The school has no choice but to follow suit and lay the cards on the table. The board writes a letter of 5 pages to the parents on November 2nd, about the consequences of “calling the principal into question, multiple times”. This is what the story watered down to, and it was the truth. And the perfect illustration of how the school leaders view the world.
But what about those confidential allegations? Even though they are lying on the Chief’s desk, they originate from the principal and his assistant, and the board has to come clean on that point as well. But Groutars holds a prominent position in the biggest political party and doesn’t care for the Chief very much. It is out of the question that this couple is going to ‘win’ and virtually take over the school.
He drummed up every lawyer within reach and weaved quite a nifty feature into the letter, aimed at letting the parents sign their own ‘confession’. A classic model, especially in countries that are on the human rights violation list. It was in all-out attempt to turn this thing around.
It fails. The parents on the 3rd file charge against the notary and his operational manager, the board goes into hibernation. “No comment”.
January 2007. The family have switched to the Montessori school, which resides under the same school board. As do most of the schools in Maastricht. Interesting to note, Mr. Groutars follows within a few weeks and also moves his children to the new school. In a jiff he has his foot in the door of the principal’s office. This thing is not over. And he was absolutely right, but not the way he anticipated
March 19th. A short incoming phone call presents an instant opportunity. A few hours later, Theo is on his way to the Bisschopsingel bureau, walks inside undercover under the name Eduard van Diemen, and with the help of an informant gets out a stack of documents ”for internal use only”, among which the confidential mutation forms. The reconstruction practically writes itself.
Meanwhile at Annadal 1 it is acknowledged that this matter is headed in the wrong direction. And decided to revert to that other recipe: if not the easy way, then the super-easy way.
Who exactly comes up with the idea is unclear, but somebody says it out loud: wouldn’t the notable winemaker’s wife – who also brought her children to Wolder elementary school – be the ideal mother to lay down a reliable crown witness testimony of an ”assault”? Who’s going to ask her? Most ideally that would be the wine farmer himself. Whoever puts the question, Luca Hulst-Nijsten says yes.
The story contains visual elements that would not have been out of place in a Hollywood script; good old chase in the building, the teacher with a cane and the antagonist with ”slicked back hair, dark glasses and a half long leather coat”. Those are the words Quaedackers contributes and they perfectly match HKS code 400.
The father now is a suspect. Formalized in 39 page police file 2006145758, April 2007. First person narrator in that crown testimony is officer Ten Brink. Luca didn’t have to sign. She only had to nod her head.
Police officer Coolen typed the police report for the assault victim, teacher Lemmens. But he made a mistake. He used the registration number that had already been used on the previously mentioned confidential mutation form 2006146376-1. In X-Pol, the existence of double registration numbers is not possible. Not in the official software version anyway. In other words, documents had been recycled, dates changed.
In addition, there is small printed code on X-Pol documents under the horizontal line I mentioned earlier: the form number, chronologically allocated by the computer. This is an (in)visible time stamp. The form number must correspond with the date a police officer types in to close and sign a police report.
A fabricated time line was exposed, from two different angles. There even had been some old skool copying and pasting going on, next to the Xerox machine, with scissors, tape and Tipp-Ex on the table. The Maastricht police was busted, and as an inevitable result the wine makers, the DA, the principal and the teacher, who signed the documents in the teacher’s room somewhere at lunchtime between the soup and the bread, April 2007.
We later immediately recognized the same thing in police file 2007170431. Same MO, copying and pasting text, false accusations against the Ibrahim family, witnesses, nasty aggression and even the same police officers showed up.
And again when they picked me up in 2010, another 600 pages were produced. So far, we have been accused of trespassing, assault, heavy drinking, drug dealing, threats, flipping fingers, stealing, stalking and car chasing. We never saw the inside of a court room.In
In November 2008, Frans Grouters was elected CDA Maastricht Chairman.
Read the full story in Dutch here
