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21 September 2004
AMSTERDAM — Former world champion boxer Nordin ben Salah was shot and killed in Amsterdam on Monday night, it was reported Tuesday.
A spokesman for a Purmerend sports school where “Fighting Nordin” trained confirmed to Expatica on Tuesday that the 32-year-old Moroccan-born man had been killed.
He said Ben Salah finished training on Monday night and caught a train at 9.30pm to Amsterdam, where police believe he was confronted by two to three men.
Ben Salah, a Dutch national, was then shot at about 10pm on the President Kennedylaan in Amsterdam. He died later in hospital. “It is a tragedy,” the spokesman said.
The boxer’s website had not officially confirmed the murder by 2.30pm on Tuesday.
Police have refused to confirm the victim’s identity, but say he was shot several times. They are searching for several suspects.
A motorbike was found on the Weesperzijde, but police have not yet confirmed if it was used in the shooting, newspaper De Telegraaf reported.
Ben Salah recaptured his intercontinental WBA super middleweight title in September 2003, but was more recently active as a boxing promoter.
He was due to defend the title in September this year, but the fight was postponed because he had injury problems with his arms.
The sports school spokesman said Ben Salah thus lost his title because it must be defended within 12 months. He was preparing to reclaim the title again in November.
There has been a string of gangland slayings in Amsterdam in recent years, but the spokesman denied Ben Salah was involved in the underworld.
“He was not in the criminal circuit. He was a boxer and manager and that’s all we know. And he was a boxing teacher; he worked the whole day in the boxing centre,” he said.
There have been four high profile gangland slayings in the Amsterdam region so far this year. The most notable was the murder in May of real estate magnate Willem Endstra, the reputed “banker of the underworld” in the Netherlands. His killer is still at large.
[Copyright Expatica News 2004]
Subject: Dutch news