Courtside Europe
True crime from the continent. Told in English.
European court cases American audiences have never heard — told with the intelligence of a BBC documentary and the intimacy of Serial. New episodes every Tuesday.
Hosted by Ellis Ward & Maren Cole
All Episodes(5)
Eighty-Two Seconds
At quarter to four on a Saturday afternoon in Brussels, a man walked into the Jewish Museum of Belgium carrying two bags. Eighty-two seconds later, four people were dead.
The Christmas Raid
Christmas night, 25 December 2017. Just before four in the morning, thirty-two officers from Georgia's State Security Service raid a house in the village of Duisi, in the Pankisi Gorge near the Russian border. Their target is a nineteen-year-old named Temirlan Machalikashvili, suspected of supporting an ISIS-linked cell. Two officers enter his bedroom. They shoot him in the head at close range.
The Liquidator
Amsterdam, 26 February 2024. A Dutch court, sitting inside a purpose-built fortified bunker under a prison — the Extra Secure Court, known as De Bunker — hands down a life sentence against Ridouan Taghi. The verdict closes the Marengo trial, the largest criminal prosecution in Dutch history. Over five years, it examined billions of euros in cocaine trafficking, a witness protection regime that collapsed around the people it was meant to shield, and the assassinations of lawyer Derk Wiersum and investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries.
The Middlemen
March 2016. The Age in Australia and The Huffington Post publish the Unaoil Files: hundreds of thousands of leaked internal emails from a Monaco-based oil-services company run by the Ahsani family — father Ata, sons Saman and Cyrus. The emails document, in barely coded language, more than a decade of systematic bribery: blue-chip corporations in the US, UK, Australia, and Europe paying a family-run firm to win oil contracts in Iraq, Libya, and Kazakhstan, and that firm paying off the officials who made the decisions.
The Road to Chevaline
5 September 2012. A remote forest road near the village of Chevaline, in the French Alps above Lake Annecy. A French cyclist discovers a BMW estate parked on the road. Inside are three bodies: Saad Al-Hilli — a British-Iraqi satellite engineer from Guildford — his wife Iqbal, and her mother Suhaila. All three have been shot multiple times in the head with a Luger pistol. Beside the car lies a fourth body: Sylvain Mollier, a French cyclist. Wrong place, wrong time — or possibly the intended target.
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