Abdullah al-Ahdal

Abdullah bin Muhammad al-Ahdal was a Saudi-born imam who served as the great Imam of Belgium and rector of the Great Mosque of Brussels until his assassination on March 29, 1989. He was shot along with the Tunisian Muslim librarian Salem el-Beher; the Lebanese organization Soldiers of the Right claimed responsibility, and Belgian authorities and news media linked the killings to the controversy over Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, since al-Ahdal had publicly criticized Rushdie while also arguing that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa ordering Rushdie's death was contrary to Islamic law. Doubts about this account persist because al-Ahdal had received death threats over his sermons on the possibility of different religions coexisting with Islam, before his rejection of the fatwa; in 2008 a Belgian newspaper reported that a Moroccan-Belgian arms smuggler, Abdelkader Belliraj, had confessed to murdering al-Ahdal, el-Beher and a driver for the Saudi embassy in Brussels after the three had reportedly witnessed fraud at the embassy, though later Belgian police investigations did not sustain these allegations.