Van Gogh killer to face terrorist charge

Dutch prosecutors said Wednesday they will charge the man jailed for life for murdering filmmaker Theo van Gogh as a member of an Islamic terror network believed to have plotted attacks against politicians.

The plans to charge Mohammed Bouyeri as a member of the Hofstad Network were revealed at a custody hearing for 11 other alleged members.

Bouyeri, 27, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on Tuesday for Van Gogh's murder, which judges ruled was an act of terrorism since it was motivated by a radical Islamic cause.

The Hofstad Network was rounded up in the weeks following Van Gogh's Nov. 2 slaying. Prosecutors say they were plotting to kill Parliament members Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both fierce critics of radical Islam, informs Associated Press.

The Chairman of the court Udo Willem Bentinck said life imprisonment is the only fitting punishment for a crime which sought to undermine Dutch society.

"The public must therefore be protected to its maximum from the suspect, and as such, there is only one sentence which befits this case; life long imprisonment."

The killer Mohammed Bouyeri offered no defense at his two-day trial. He accused Van Gogh of insulting Islam, and told the court he would do it again if given the chance.

Bouyeri is the son of Moroccan immigrants, but was raised and educated in the Netherlands.

Van Gogh, a distant relative of the 18th-century painter Vincent van Gogh, was a social critic and columnist who attacked the treatment of women in fundamentalist Islamic households in a short film, "Submission," which offended many Muslims.

The film's scriptwriter was Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born member of parliament who went into hiding after Van Gogh's murder because she was named in the note left on the corpse, reports Associated Press.