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Home / Hollywood and TV / Theo van Gogh was killed on an Amsterdam street on 2 November 2004, and Mohammed Bouyeri…
Case file s1869 · Hollywood and TV · 2004
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2004
Map of Netherlands, marked on the globe
Map of Netherlands. Rob. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Died
2 November 2004
Place
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Field
film director (Submission) · Film and television on the timeline
Legal tradition
Dutch law · Civil law
Historical event
Murder of Theo van Gogh; Amsterdam District Court verdict of 26 July 2005
Religion
Theo van Gogh (film director): Atheist and agnostic (recorded as atheism on Wikidata)
Hollywood and TVMurder and sudden deathNowEuropeNetherlands
AI illustration: The Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam on a grey November morning, 2004, a bicycle lying on its side in the empty street
Illustration made with AI for celebrity.estate.

Theo van Gogh was killed on an Amsterdam street on 2 November 2004, and Mohammed Bouyeri was sentenced to life without parole as a terrorist

Theo van Gogh was cycling to work in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004 when Mohammed Bouyeri attacked him. Van Gogh had directed Submission, a short film on the treatment of women in Islam. Bouyeri admitted the killing in court, said he acted on religious conviction and said he would do it again. On 26 July 2005 a three-judge panel of the Amsterdam District Court found him guilty and sentenced him to life. The court treated the killing as a terrorist act intended to intimidate politicians and the public. A life sentence in the Netherlands carries no parole. He was 27 at sentencing. The Dutch state prosecuted the case as terrorism, so the verdict, not the family, fixed the public record of the death. No dispute over van Gogh's estate appears in the sources reviewed, and the wider Hofstad network trials are not covered here†.

What the law took from it

A public figure's killing becomes a state case, and the verdict sets the record.

Sources
  1. Al JazeeraPress
  2. NBC NewsPress
  3. jurist.orgPress
  4. NPRPress

Cite as: celebrity.estate, “Theo van Gogh was killed on an Amsterdam street on 2 November 2004, and Mohammed Bouyeri was sentenced to life without parole as a terrorist,” story s1869, https://www.celebrity.estate/theo-van-gogh-2004, updated 30 October 2026.

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Where this case sits

Hollywood and TVMurder and sudden deathNowEuropeCivil lawNetherlands