Derkaoui van der Meijden (34) killed on Borneokade despite his bulletproof vest

Derkaoui Elarbi Ben Bouchaib van der Meijden (34), son of a Moroccan father and a Dutch mother, grew up in Amsterdam-Oost and was known to friends as Derk or Pirki. He was known to police. On the evening of Monday 18 August 2014 he had arranged to meet someone at around eleven on the corner of C. van Eesterenlaan and Borneolaan in the Eastern Docklands. The two decided to walk around the block. Near a nursery Van der Meijden was fired on by the passenger on a scooter. The gunman barely had the automatic weapon under control; he missed repeatedly at close range and bullets flew in all directions. Van der Meijden was hit but managed to get away. He turned, and turned again, and so walked another loop — which brought him back into the killers near Borneokade. There he was fatally hit. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, but it was no protection against the hail of bullets. Van der Meijden was said to have been involved in the December 2012 double killing in the Staatsliedenbuurt and was counted in the camp of Gwenette Martha, who had been killed three months earlier. His death fits the run of score-settlings that prosecutors traced to a dispute over a consignment of cocaine. The case remained unsolved.