British court throws out ‘dodgy’ Dutch extradition request for 30-year-old murder

C J de Mooi via Twitter
C J de Mooi via Twitter

A British television personality will not be extradited to the Netherlands to face murder charges because of ‘basic errors’ on the arrest warrant, British paper the Mirror said on Tuesday.

Dutch detectives had put in an extradition request about a murder which the man may have committed 30 years ago while living in Amsterdam, the paper said.

Joseph Connagh, who goes by the name CJ de Mooi, wrote about the incident in his autography which was published last year. He described how he punched a homeless man who approached him with a knife and then threw him into a canal in Amsterdam in 1988.

‘I fully suspect I killed him. I’ve no idea what happened to him,’ he wrote. De Mooi says he worked as a prostitute in London and Amsterdam after becoming homeless in his teens.

No charges and no body

Asked about the extradition request by British prosecutors, the Dutch public prosecution department said there is no arrest warrant for De Mooi in the Netherlands and no decision had been taken whether or not to charge him. Nor had a potential victim been named.

British magistrates threw out the extradition request, describing it as a ‘dodgy case’, the Mirror said.

Dutch prosecutors told broadcaster NOS earlier that it is not clear if he did actually kill anyone. ‘There was more than one body found in the water that year, and we don’t know if any of them were the potential victim,’ the spokesman said.

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