Ammar Ajar Motive: Why Did Abdel Rahman Akkad Hold the Apple Store Hostage? Was He Mentally Unwell?

Netflix’s ‘iHostage’ presents an incredible true story of the hostages who are trapped within an Apple Store in Amsterdam when one man, named Ammar Ajar, walks into the store with arms and explosives. He wants the government to pay him an inexorbitant amount in return for not blowing up the entire place and killing everyone inside. While the government considers his offer, they also try to find a way to get the hostages out safely. Meanwhile, a major question lingers in their minds: what made him commit this grievous crime, and what does he really want from it?

The True Intentions Behind Abdel Rahman Akkad’s Crimes Never Came to Light

On February 22, 2022, when Abdel Rahman Akkad took around 70 people hostage inside an Apple store in a premier location in Amsterdam, he asked for about two hundred million euros in cryptocurrency. His other demand was to let him get away with the crime. But what everyone really wanted to know was why he was doing all this. When he walked into the store, he was armed with two guns, along with an explosive vest. He threatened to make it explode if the authorities tried to get too close to him or if they tried to neutralise him without giving him what he wanted. Later, however, it turned out that the explosives were never armed, which means that they were never intended to cause any major harm to people in Akkad’s vicinity. These were the harmless explosives used by the Ministry of Defense in their training sessions.

By the end of the day, Akkad met an unfortunate end when his Bulgarian hostage tried to make a run of it, and he, instead, was run down by a police car. Akkad died of his injuries a few days later, and whatever reasons he had for the armed robbery died with him. Despite his death, the investigation continued because the cops wanted to know what he was really up to. They raided the home he lived in, the house his parents lived in, and the places of his loved ones from where he could have operated and whose help he could have asked for in his criminal endeavour. However, no final conclusion came out of it, which is why the real motive behind Akkad’s actions still remains a mystery.

Abdel’s Troubled Past Hints at the Possible Degradation of His Mental Health

If one were to make an assumption, one could say that his financial problems were the main reason behind his descent into crime. In 2018, he launched a company that fell out of business and into financial ruin pretty soon. Akkad needed money to keep things afloat, apart from providing for his family, so it makes sense that he turned towards robbing a store and holding people hostage in exchange for a sum that could completely change things for him. He also mentioned his financial troubles to the male negotiator and expressed his anger at the system for making things unfair for him. However, the latter part referred to the troubles he had encountered with the law.

A look into his life before the robbery revealed that he was no stranger to being in prison. In fact, his records showed that he had been in and out of prison for a while. He was also noted to be of unstable health when it came to his mental well-being. Akkad was known to have caused trouble with emergency service workers and had even been arrested for possessing an illegal firearm. His ex-girlfriend had also filed a case against him, where he was accused of bombarding her with pornographic images and messages that had an adverse impact on her physical and mental well-being. He had been terrorising her for over five months in 2020, when she eventually reached out to the cops. For all this, including assault, he was sentenced to sixty hours of community service and a month of probation, along with a three-year restraining order that prevented him from contacting his ex and bothering her.

While the cops found out all about his past and his previous criminal activities, they could never ascertain what exactly made him target the Apple store and what he actually needed the money for. Questions were raised about his mental health, but with no official diagnosis, it is impossible to say what was going on in his mind at the time. Moreover, the cops wanted to know who exactly he got the weapons from and who helped him plan and execute the robbery. None of these questions were answered in the investigation, and the only person who could answer them was gone. So, at the end of the day, the cops had to accept their defeat and confess that they had no idea why Akkad did what he did, and if he had any help in all that.