Bali’s shocking murder as a Dutch tourist is hacked to death in front of a girlfriend
Another gruesome killing took place in Bali this week when a tourist from the Netherlands was attacked by two knife-wielding killers on a motorcycle and hacked to death in front of his girlfriend on the street.
This is a shocking incident that has left the residents shocked following similar incidents on the island.
Last month, a Ukrainian man was kidnapped, tortured, and beheaded by suspected members of the Chechen mafia.
Earlier this month, three Australians were found guilty of the targeted killing of another Australian man in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, and a Bali detective told news.com.au the island’s homicide rate had risen sharply in the past year.
At 10pm on Monday evening (March 23), 49-year-old Rene Pouw of Dutch origin was brutally attacked by two men in front of his house in the inner city of Kerobokan, which is home to Bali’s infamous Kerobokan prison, popularly known as the Bali Hilton.
The crime was witnessed by the victim’s girlfriend, a 30-year-old Indonesian woman identified by the initials PI.
He told the police that Pouw was injured with a knife on his head, neck, shoulder and lower thighs, in addition to cuts on his hands and arms when he tried to defend himself in the incident.
The PI also told the police that the killers, who were wearing a black and green jacket commonly used by motorists in Indonesia, then chased him down the road with a bloody knife.
“The deceased’s girlfriend hid in a dark place in front of the fourth house because the criminal was targeting the ojol jacket,” said North Kuta police chief Commissioner I Ketut Agus Pasek Sudina. “[Only] after feeling safe and seeing the perpetrators fleeing towards the highway, [did] he gathered courage and went out.”
Another witness, identified by the initials KPTAP, told police that he heard people crying and saw the killers fleeing the scene in a black Honda Vario, noting that the pillion passenger was still brandishing a long knife described as a samurai sword in Indonesian news outlets.
Pouw was taken by ambulance to the private BIMC hospital in Bali but fell unconscious before arriving. He was said to have died due to blood loss at 11:30 pm. The body was transferred to Ngoerah Central General Hospital on Tuesday morning, where it is being prepared for an autopsy.
“So far I have only done an external examination,” Dr Nola Margaret Gunawan, the medical examiner who will conduct the autopsy, told news.com.au.
“Most of the wounds are large in size and most of them are above the body and head.”
Dr. Gunawan, who has worked as a coroner in Bali since 2019, said that the rate of violent murders in Bali increased significantly last year.
“From the first day I started working in Bali until the end of 2024, I did an autopsy on one homicide victim. But in the first six months of 2025, I received one homicide victim every month, and it was while I was at work,” he said, adding, “This is the second homicide victim I have received this year, and it’s still in March.”
Commissioner Sudina said the police are still trying to find the cause of the attack, adding that theft is considered a possible cause because “no property of the victim was lost.”
But according to Algemeen Dagblad (AD), a Dutch daily newspaper, Pouw was a convicted drug criminal on the run from the law and was probably killed “targeted” to “pay off” a bad debt.
“Everything points to him being a man with the same name who was on the run from Dutch investigations for years,” AD reported. “His name and age in previous posts on this website … match exactly with Indonesian police information.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague reports that it is aware of the death of a Dutch man, but for privacy reasons it does not want to say [same person] known around the world.”
Pouw was sentenced to five years in 2005 for drug trafficking, but served one year before fleeing the Netherlands during a weekend break. In 2010, he was placed on the National Wanted List. In 2011, Pouw was re-arrested in Spain and served the remainder of his sentence there before moving to Southeast Asia.
“The authorities were very interested in him at that time,” added the AD. “He was on their radar because he might have wanted to testify in the big Passage case, about the failed assassination attempts.”
Back in Bali, Badung police chief Joseph Edward Purba, whose area is investigating the murder and the North Kuta police, announced that an island-wide manhunt is underway to nab the suspects. “The team is busy with investigations to find out who and where the perpetrators are,” he said. “This case is important to us.”
