(JTA) — A Dutch human resources firm has determined that a Palestinian man who twice vandalized a kosher restaurant and tried to set it ablaze had terrorist motives.
The NTA firm on Wednesday determined that Saleh Ali, an asylum seeker from Syria, indeed had terrorist motives when he smashed the windows of the HaCarmel restaurant in Amsterdam in 2017 and again in May 2020 while holding a lighter, Het Parool reported. NTA was hired by the Dutch government to determine Saleh’s motives in the attack and prosecutors have accepted the firm’s conclusion, Telegraaf reported.
Ali, 32, has not been convicted of a hate crime and served 52 days in jail for vandalism for the first attack, which he said he committed to avenge the moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. NTA was hired to determine his motives in the second attack, for which he now awaits trial.
A former jihadist fighter in Syria, Ali remains at a psychiatric observation center, where he threatened a fellow resident who is Jewish with a billiard ball, the Het Parool report said.
News of the NTA findings provoked ridicule on social media.
“So this wasn’t a case of an unsatisfied patron who didn’t like the gefilte fish,” the opera critic Olivier Keegel wrote on Facebook.
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