Pierre Heijboer
Pierre Heijboer was a Dutch journalist.
Career
Heijboer initially worked for the Limburgs Dagblad and the Nieuwe Eindhovense Courant. In 1968, Heijboer moved to Amsterdam, where he started working for Het Parool. He settled in the new Bijlmer neighborhood. From 1980, he worked as domestic editor for de Volkskrant. In 1983, Heijboer became an editor in Maastricht, he lived in Wijnandsrade for some time. Together with his colleague Hans Horsten, he conducted research into the Dutch Civil Servants Pension Fund, which turned out to receive extra subsidies due to fraud. State secretary Gerrit Brokx had to resign in 1986 as a result of the affair and a parliamentary inquiry into construction subsidies followed later that year, led by Klaas de Vries.Heijboer took early retirement in 1997.
Bijlmer disaster
Heijboer investigated the Bijlmer disaster that took place in Bijlmermeer in 1992. He followed the parliamentary inquiry into the Bijlmer disaster of 1998–1999 very critically. From day to day, he provided the probes with critical commentary.Heijboer was convinced that the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry had not found the truth about the disaster; according to him, El Al's Boeing 747 had been a military aircraft.
Under the name Het Klankbord he collected facts about the Bijlmer disaster that were concealed during the parliamentary inquiry. He paid particular attention to the victims. He wrote a book about it, Doemvlucht: de verzwegen geheimen van de Bijlmerramp, which was published in 2002.
In 2003, Heijboer demanded compensation from the Aviation Enforcement Service, because the service allegedly tampered with a file on helicopter flights over the Bijlmer, which Heijboer had requested in reliance on the Dutch Public Access to Government Information Act. The Dutch Association of Journalists supported Heijboer in his demand. A few years later, he published Wachten op de nachtegaal: het verhaal van de Bijlmermeer about forty years of Bijlmer, from dream neighborhood to the most maligned locale in the Netherlands.
Heijboer's investigation into the disaster plays a major role in w:nl:Rampvlucht , a TV drama series published in 2022. Heijboer was played by Yorick van Wageningen.