Bulgarian woman killed in center of Amsterdam

During the night of Friday 3 to Saturday 4 May 2024, 56-year-old Bulgarian national Eugenia Tonchtcheva was killed with ten stab wounds in her flat on the Nieuwendijk in Amsterdam. Police found the victim in a blood-stained home next to two broken knives, and the day after the incident 51-year-old Colombian suspect José van de W. from Tiel was arrested on the basis of camera footage and witness statements describing him walking covered in blood in the nearby Spuistraat. The couple had been together for only a few months. At the hearing on 5 November 2025 prosecutors demanded sixteen years in prison for an exceptionally violent murder, an act the bereaved family called a textbook case of femicide. Despite incriminating evidence such as blood traces in his car and a handprint on a washing machine, the suspect denied any involvement and suggested the murder must have taken place after he left, while his defence sought acquittal because of the absence of DNA evidence on the knives. On 3 December 2025 the Amsterdam district court sentenced him to sixteen years, in line with the demand. The court called the killing gruesome and took into account that the victim may have survived for some time after being stabbed: those final moments of her life must have been terrifying, painful and full of stress, the court said.