A Skorpion vz. 61 submachine gun, a handgun, and a bomb vest. These were the weapons that Ammar Ajar, the fictional life counterpart of real-life hostage-taker, Abdel Rahman Akkad, was armed with during the hostage situation at the center of iHostage. On February 22, 2022, Abdel entered the Apple Store on the ground floor of the Hirsch building and fired a few shots to terrorize the people inside the premises. And even though it looked like an armed robbery at first, that wasn’t what Abdel had in mind. I mean, what would you steal from an electronics store? A few MacBooks and iPhones? Netflix’s iHostage, on various occasions, hinted that Abdel just wanted to intimidate the authorities so that they would immediately approve his demands and let him walk freely without any fuss. As per the reports, it was Abdel himself who dialed the 112 emergency number and asked to speak with a female police negotiator so he could put forward his demands and leave the shop as quickly as possible. He didn’t mean to stay inside the store for long, nor did he intend to bring harm to anyone, as he knew it would complicate matters beyond repair.
Abdel threatened to blow himself up
Abdel, standing near the store’s glass front, told the female negotiator that he would blow himself up along with the Bulgarian hostage in his captivity if his demands weren’t met quickly. Unfortunately, the female negotiator on the other end of the call couldn’t understand what he meant by “the detonator for his bomb vest,” which was when Abdel asked for a male police negotiator so he could better explain how dangerous he was. According to Willem, the police negotiator of the Department of Special Investigation (DSI), Abdel likely wanted more validation and recognition for the explosives he had been carrying on his body, and therefore demanded to speak to a man who could understand the seriousness of the threat he posed. The thing is, the bomb vest wasn’t Abdel’s primary weapon. It was fear. He wanted to scare the authorities into believing that he was carrying real explosives so they would submit to his demands and deliver what he had been asking. Abdel had been rigorously following the reports and updates on social media to check how effectively his threats had been working; however, he got a bit restless and committed a serious mistake in haste, which ruined his meticulous plan.
Abdel Had Fake Explosives
At 7:01 P.M., he sent a few selfies to AT5 on WhatsApp, showing off his bomb and the Bulgarian hostage he had taken captive. I guess he wanted the local news channel to run those images on TV so as to make the general public realize how dangerous he was. He wanted everyone to know that he wasn’t bluffing and that he might bring havoc to the busiest neighborhood in Amsterdam if the government didn’t give him his money.
In Netflix’s iHostage, DSI supervisor Abe immediately showed the hostage-taker’s selfies to a member of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service (EOD), who told Abe that the writings on the explosive components indicated that they were practice ordnance. In real life too, the police had found that Abdel had harmless plastic explosives on him, which are generally used by the Ministry of Defense during their training maneuvers. However, as shown in the film, the police weren’t sure if the labels on the explosives were correct. Abdel had two real guns with him, and the authorities suspected that he might have put a fake sticker around the real explosives. They even considered the possibility that he might have hidden the real explosives in the two bags he was carrying or might have placed them inside the AH Van, which he had parked outside the store with the vehicle’s lights flashing the whole evening. The police knew that they were dealing with a mentally confused man, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous to the people around him, which was why they took all the necessary precautions and considered the explosives to be real till the very end.
In the end, Abdel was hit with a DSI armored vehicle, soon after which the authorities sent a police robot to examine the explosives on his body. Well thankfully, the explosive components weren’t real, and once the authorities made sure that the assailant was no longer a threat, he was quickly attended to by the medical personnel, who, under police protection, took Abdel to the hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries the following day.
The authorities couldn’t track the weapons
Even after the hostage-taker’s death, the police continued their investigation and interrogated the people related to the perpetrator to track down the origins of the arms and ammunition Abdel was carrying with him. According to an explosive’s expert, Ad van Riel, the training explosives Abdel had on his body were most likely training material stolen from the Ministry of Defense, which once again raised the question of who stole it and, most importantly, who gave it to Abdel and why? And Abdel likely didn’t get these explosives for free, right? So how was he able to afford them, and what arrangement did he have with the seller? In the absence of Abdel’s testimony, the authorities just went down a rabbit hole with new questions turning up with every single lead, and unfortunately, there was no one to provide them with satisfactory answers. Abdel had been previously arrested for the illegal possession of firearms, and it could be possible that it was the same seller who gave him the weapons and explosives to carry out such a terrifying attack. But just like I said, these are just theories the police came up with while investigating the case, and they haven’t found out the source of these weapons till today.
