Syrian born teenager Ryan Al Najjar from Joure, Holland was brutally murdered last year after what Dutch prosecutors called an ‘Honor killing’

On May 28, 2024, days after her 18th birthday, Ryan Al Najjar was found lying face down in a small stream in a remote Dutch nature park in the town of Lelystad

As found, she had been gagged, bound all over and her hands tied behind her back – approximately 18 meters of tape had been used to bind her body

Evidence indicates that she had been ‘suffocated or strangled’, but cause of death was drowning, meaning she had been thrown into the water while still alive

On January 5, Ryan’s brothers Muhanad Al Najjar, and Mohamed Al Najjar, and her father Khaled Al Najjar, were all found guilty of murdering her in a so-called honor killing

Al Najjar, 25, and Mohamed Al Najjar, 23, each was sentenced to 20 years in prison

Their father Khaled Al Najjar, 53, who had fled back to Syria after the murder, was sentenced in Absentia to 30 years in prison

Ryan Al Najjar, [photo], was 18 when she was brutally murdered by her father and two brothers in May 2024. Motive for the ‘honor killing’ of the Syrian asylee allegedly, was that she had become too ‘Westernized’ – She refused to wear a headscarf, socialized with men, and used social media in a way that displeased her family

On Monday January 5, a court in in Lelystad, Holland, sentenced two brothers, Muhanad and Mohamed Al Najjar to 20 years in prison each for the murder of their younger sister, nine months ago.
The court earlier convicted Muhanad Al Najjar 25, Mohamed Al Najjar, 23 along with their father Khaled Al Najjar for killing Rayan Al Najjar in what Dutch prosecutors called ‘Honor killing’.
The motive for the ‘honor killing by the family of Syrian asylees according to Dutch authorities, was because they deemed that their daughter had become too ‘Westernized’. Khaled then fled back to Syria after killing his teenage daughter
The family’s journey to sentencing in a Dutch courtroom began more than a decade earlier when civil war broke out in Syria in 2012. At the time the family was living in the area around the Syrian city of Idlib, not far from Taftanaz.
Seeking survival Khaled Al Najjar first fled to Turkey with his family. He later paid people-smugglers just under $4,400 to transport their son across Europe to Holland in 2015. When the 15-year-old was granted asylum in Holland Khaled Al Najjar, his wife and seven other children were successful applying to join him.
The warm hospitality given the refugees by Dutch authorities extended to the local council in the northern town of Joure having a seven-room unit reserved for the disabled, specially converted to accommodate the large family.
Furniture was supplied, as were school places, language classes, and benefits.
Thriving on the public aid, in the years that followed, Khaled would go on to open a pizza shop and a courier firm.

Courtroom sketch of suspects, the victim’s brothers Muhanad [left], and Mohammed Al Najjar, [right], who were found guilty of helping their father, Khaled, in the ‘honor killing’ of their teenage sister Ryan Al Najjar last year. Each brother will spend 20 years in prison

Days after her 18th birthday, their daughter’s body was found lying face down in a small stream in a remote Dutch nature park. On May 28, 2024, Ryan Al Najjar was discovered in Lelystad, about 25 miles north-east of Amsterdam. She had been reported missing six days earlier.
When Rayan’s body was recovered, she had been gagged, bound all over with tape, her hands tied behind her back. Reportedly, approximately 18 meters of tape had been used to bind her body.
According to the charging complaint, there was evidence that the teen had been ‘suffocated or strangled.’ However, cause of death was drowning, meaning she had been thrown into the water while still alive.
On January 5, Ryan’s brothers Muhanad and Mohamed as well her father Khaled, were all found guilty in the so-called honor killing.
While the brothers were sentenced to two decades each behind bars, their Khalid Al Najjar, 53, was sentenced in absentia to 30 years in prison for the perverse and cold-blooded murder of his own daughter.
Delivering the verdicts to a packed courtroom Judge Miranda Loots said: ‘It is the task of a parent to support their child and allow them to flourish. Khaled did the opposite.’
The family was riled up because Rayan become too westernized. Growing into her teenage years, she stopped covering her hair and began hanging out with girls and boys from different backgrounds and using social media. She was happier dressed in jeans, trainers, and a hoodie.
While the authorities had been involved in trying to protect Ryan in the years before her death, she never quite escaped the grasp of her highly conservative family.
But, having turned 18, she made it clear she wanted nothing more to do with them. And so they decided to kill her. To the family Rayan was just a ‘burden’ that needed to be eliminated – a ‘pig’ that had to be ‘slaughtered’., prosecutors said.
‘A snake would be a better daughter,’ her father raged in a string of messages sent on a family WhatsApp group. While another relative railed: ‘May God let her be killed by a train, I spit on her. She’s tarnished our reputation.’
Rayan’s mother was not left out in the hate fest. A message sent from her mother’s phone read: ‘She is a slut and should be killed.’
Subsequently in May last year Rayan Al Najjar was abducted, bound and brutalized, and her body dumped in a watery grave.
the violent, controlling patriarch of the family, turned out to be a coward, too.
After killing his daughter, Khaled Al Najjar, 5, travelled to Turkey and then, and made his way back to Syria, hence the fugitive was tried and sentenced in his absence.
Although Khaled subsequently claimed in emails sent to a Dutch newspaper to be the only person responsible for Ryan’s death, investigators established that his two eldest sons were also present. 
Dutch authorities say that the absence of an extradition treaty and lack of established diplomatic ties Syria means that the murder convicted may never face restitution. However, Syria’s Ministry of Justice countered that the government has never received a request from the Netherlands regarding this case.
Khaled currently lives in the north-west of Syria where he has a new life, a new family and according to relatives, has little remorse for his crime.
‘He is married and has started a family,’ his older daughter, Iman, bristled.
‘Is this the justice the Netherlands is talking about? We demand that the Dutch authorities and all parties involved arrest him, because he is a murderer.
‘My father was difficult to live with because he wanted everything to be as he said, even if it was wrong,’ Iman, 27, said

In this family portrait of the Al Najjar taken eight years before the killing Ryan, then 10, is sitting front row [left], while Mohamad, 15, is holding a baby [right], Khaled Al Najjar is sitting behind. Khaled was accused of killing his daughter with the aid of Mohamad and another son, Muhanad

‘Tension and fear hung over the house because of him. He was very unfair and temperamental towards my siblings, and he hit and threatened me. Once, my father hit Ryan, after which she went to school and never came home. She was taken into the care of a child protection organization.
‘Since then, there has been constant tension and sadness in the house because a family member is no longer there – the family is no longer whole, and that is very sad.’
What is equally sad is that the problem of ‘honor-based’ violence is far from rare in Holland – each year, police see up to 3,000 offences in which it is involved. Of these, somewhere between seven and 17 incidents end with fatalities, be that murder, manslaughter, or suicide. In the case of Ryan, the first sign that something was wrong came in 2021 when the authorities discovered the 15-year-old was carrying a knife with her on the way to school, and was threatening to kill herself, so unhappy was she with her home life.
Two years later, in February 2023, matters came to a head when she appeared, barefoot, at a neighbor’s house, telling them: ‘You have to help me, you have to help me. My father wants to kill me.’ According to the neighbor, the girl said she had been locked up by her father because she was seeing a boy.
She said: ‘And her father didn’t approve. She fled through the window. She probably saw the lights on at our house.’

A year prior to her murder, Ryan [photo], appeared, barefoot, at a neighbor’s house, telling them: ‘You have to help me, you have to help me. My father wants to kill me.’ the girl said she had been locked up by her father because she was seeing a boy

From 2021 to her 18th birthday in May 2024, the teenager was in and out of various care homes and had also been placed under strict government-backed security.
But for reasons which the Dutch authorities have refused to explain, Ryan left the scheme around the time of her death.
‘She stayed in open institutions and then would often return to her family,’ said a spokesperson for the Netherlands Control Centre for Protection and Safety, which presented staff with a ‘dilemma’.
‘We did everything we could to protect Ryan, and we tried to avert danger by collaborating with adult services so she would be protected after she turned 18.’
That birthday was clearly a significant turning point. A photo shows her celebrating on social media, complete with balloons.
Around the same time, she did a live video on TikTok, without a headscarf and wearing make-up. In it, she shared her name and the names of her family members and urged authorities to ‘remove the children’ from her parents’ care.
A subsequent message to a younger brother read: ‘I am never coming back. It’s over, my way of thinking and yours clash, it’s very difficult to understand each other.’
Enraged, her father fired off messages to the family WhatsApp group saying that they now had ‘no choice’. In one, he said that ‘under sharia law’ he was permitted to kill his daughter, asking family members for suggestions.
A ‘suicide pill from Turkey’ was one of the proposals, along with poison or encouraging her to commit suicide. Determined to act, Khaled instructed his two sons to find Ryan and then ‘throw her in a lake and let the fish eat her’.
Six days after she left the family’s home in Joure, the brothers drove to Rotterdam, where Ryan was staying with a male friend. Fearing for her life, she grabbed a knife and locked herself in a bedroom.
But they persuaded her to come out and return home to ‘apologize’ to her father. It was a decision that cost her life.
Investigators traced the route the car took from Rotterdam to an isolated nature park near Lelystad using roadside cameras and mobile phone data. They also traced Khaled’s movements, first to a hardware store and then leaving his house at 11.31pm on May 27, 2024.
Less than an hour later, he met his sons as they waited in a lay-by with Ryan.
At trial, prosecutors stated that the victim’s brothers took Ryan from a house in Rotterdam on the night of the crime and drove her to a remote area where she met her father. The father’s DNA, found under her fingernails, confirmed his presence during the murder. 
The brothers claimed in court that their father walked off into the reserve with Ryan ‘to talk’. Minutes later, he reappeared alone. Rayan ‘ran away’ after he hit her, he said, so they went home.
However, data recovered from the brothers’ mobile phones showed that while at the scene, one had ‘descended’ six meters, the exact fall from the road to the path that led into the woods. It also recorded how his 220-step count was exactly the same as Ryan’s – but whereas her phone only recorded a one-way trip, his showed a return of the same distance.
In court, when asked why they hadn’t phoned Ryan or gone into the woods to look for her, the brothers claimed she had blocked their numbers. They added they were also in fear of their father and so left when he told them to, arriving home just after 2am.
A park ranger discovered Ryan’s lifeless body the following morning and raised the alarm.
Khaled went on the run. He flew from Bremen in Germany to Turkey before returning to the same area he supposedly escaped from. around the city of Idlib in Syria.
Before he fled Khaled instructed his sons to delete any incriminating messages before leaving the country. However, police investigation and wiretap interceptions incriminated not only the sons, but Khaled himself.
‘I got stressed from hearing stories about her, I strangled her and threw her into the river,’ he said in a message sent to his wife.
Another message read in court was written by Khalid to the family group chat a week after Ryan’s body was discovered. He explains: ‘What happened? I just read in the media you two were arrested. I killed her in a fit of rage. I threw her into the river. I thought it would blow over.’
He added: ‘My big mistake was not digging a hole for her, but I just couldn’t. I went to Turkey to get my teeth cleaned but I will be back, the courts in Holland are fair.’
From his new home in Syria Khaled, via email, admitted to the murder to Dutch media the killing while claiming his sons were innocent. ‘I am the one who killed her, and no one helped me,’ he wrote in Arabic to the Dutch paper Leeuwarder Courant.
In a later email, he claimed he had ‘no choice but to kill her’, adding it was due to her behavior as it was ‘not in line with my customs, traditions and religion’.