Two Rotterdam police officers deliberately lied while putting together a report about the arrest of a garage owner in June 2020, a magistrate in Rotterdam has ruled.

The two officers claimed that they had been attacked by Atik Samur after he refused to cooperate with a stop and search operation, but surveillance camera footage showed the police attacked him, shoving him against a wall and head butting him.

The court, which was trying Samur for resisting arrest, said earlier this week that the police officers deliberately gave the wrong account of what happened in their report.

‘It is very serious,’ court spokesman Jacco Boek told current affairs show Nieuwsuur. ‘A police officer’s report is extremely important because someone can be found guilty on the basis of it. We should be able to trust them completely.’

One of the police officers involved was earlier fined €250 for head butting Samur, whose right arm was in plaster at the time.

The footage, recorded on the garage security cameras, was handed over to the police during the investigation but was never included in the official file.

A Rotterdam police spokesman said the force had ‘no reason to believe that the officers had wrongful intentions or that they had lied.’ The national force is now investigating the case.

Lying

The court spokesman said that it is impossible for the officers to have had a ‘different experience’. ‘What he wrote did not happen and that is what we call lying,’ Boek said.

Samur’s lawyer Najat Idrissi said she is now looking into what action to take. ‘What has happened is a scandal,’ she said. ‘If you ask me what should happen, this police officer can no longer serve as one. And there should be other consequences as well.’

Vrije Universiteit sociologist Jaap Timmer told Nieuwsuur he was aware of other cases in which police reports contain wrongful information. ‘But there is no record of how many there are,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this is something we should research.’