Court convicts Taghi lawyer but does not send her back to jail

A Rotterdam court has found former criminal lawyer Inez Weski guilty of being part of the criminal organisation run by her client Ridouan Taghi from prison, and sentenced her to 42 days – equal to the time she spent in pre-trial detention in 2023 – meaning she will not return to jail.

Prosecutors had demanded a four-and-a-half-year sentence. Weski’s defence team has two weeks to decide whether to appeal.

The court found that Weski had played an essential role in carrying messages in and out of the high-security prison in Vught, where Taghi was being held in solitary confinement. The judges said the communications she relayed included a ledger with details of drug shipments, payments and debts.

Weski has denied the charges throughout and refused to give a substantive account at trial, citing attorney-client privilege.

The judges said the prosecution had committed an irreparable procedural breach by sharing confidential client information from Weski’s files with investigators, and reduced the sentence to take account of it. Weski’s poor health and the fact that she ended her 45-year legal career in 2023 also mitigated the sentence.

Sky ECC and USB sticks

The case, codenamed 26Palma, came to light during the investigation of Taghi’s nephew and former lawyer Youssef T., who was jailed for five and a half years in 2022 for similar offences. Messages between Taghi family members appeared to point to a second line of communication, which prosecutors traced to Weski.

The court said the messages had initially been sent through encrypted phones on the Sky ECC network. After that service was infiltrated by police, Weski switched to passing information on USB sticks.

The judges rejected Weski’s argument that her detention in the first nine days after her arrest in April 2023 – at a secret location her lawyers have called an “illegal bunker” – amounted to a human rights violation.

They said she had received appropriate medical care, and attributed her PTSD diagnosis to the strain of the long-running Marengo trial and her status as a suspect, rather than to the conditions of her detention.

Wider Taghi prosecutions

Taghi was sentenced to life in February 2024 for ordering six murders and four attempted murders in the so-called Mocro Mafia drugs war. He is currently appealing the conviction but has been without legal representation since April 2025, when his last lawyer Vito Shukrula was also arrested on suspicion of leaking information.

Weski’s arrest in April 2023 ended a career during which she also represented Surinamese ex-president Desi Bouterse, the Chinese people-smuggler known as “Sister P” and underworld figure Naoufal “Noffel” F.