Rotterdam’s mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb was diagnosed with cancer four years ago, but only disclosed his illness to a small group of close confidants, a new biography has revealed.

Aboutaleb underwent an operation at the end of 2020 to remove his thyroid after a tumour was discovered by chance during an X-ray on his eye.

The city council announced at the time that the mayor had been treated for a thyroid condition, but only a handful of colleagues were told about the cancer.

Aboutaleb told AD journalist Peter Groenendijk in an interview to be published this week: “This is pretty personal, it’s the sort of thing you keep to yourself.”

Groenendijk’s biography, Je Suis Ahmed, focuses on his decade and a half at the helm of the city, revealing among other things how closely he was involved in the ultimately unsuccessful project to build a new stadium complex for football club Feyenoord beside the Maas.

The 63-year-old announced in January he was stepping down as mayor after 15 years, quelling rumours that he might seek a third term in the port city. He will officially hand over the mayoral chain to Carola Schouten, a former ChristenUnie cabinet minister, on October 10.

Family consulted

Aboutaleb said he had decided to quit after consulting his family. He told local broadcaster Rijnmond: “I’ll go so far as to say that the domestic front was the initiator of this decision.”

The former Labour party junior minister became the first Muslim leader of a major European city when he was appointed in 2009, having come to the Netherlands with his family from Morocco at the age of 15.

He won worldwide acclaim in 2015 in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people died. Two gunmen broke into the building and opened fire, shouting “Allahu Akhbar” and “We have avenged the Prophet.”

The mayor told Rotterdammers that if they supported the assailants they should “get lost”. “For heaven’s sake, pack your bags and leave,” he said.

But in recent years city politicians had been increasingly critical of Aboutaleb’s decisions. Jewish community representatives refused to meet him after he declined to fly the Israeli flag following the attacks by Hamas on October 7.

The mayor instead chose instead to fly the flag of Rotterdam at half-mast so as not to exacerbate the “polarisation in our city”.

Bridge stabbing

In recent days the VVD and Leefbaar Rotterdam party groups criticised his response to a stabbing on the Erasmus bridge in which a 32-year-old German resident of the city was killed.

The attacker, a 22-year-old man from Amersfoort, shouted “Allahu Akhbar” several times during the attack. Prosecutors say the murder may have had a terrorist motive, but the mayor said: “I say that dozens of times a day. It’s a routine utterance for many Muslims.

“Whether it’s significant in the context of what we’re talking about – terrorism – I don’t know. That’s something the investigation will have to determine.”