Did they get Mata Hari wrong?
Mata Hari, the most renowned woman spy in history, who was shot for betraying secrets that were said to have lead to the deaths of thousands of soldiers during the first world war, may have been wrongly convicted, a group from her Dutch homeland claims. Eighty-four years to the day after Mata Hari’s execution by firing squad at the Vincennes forest near Paris, the group urged the French justice ministry yesterday to reopen the case against the Dutch-born exotic dancer. A delegation from the town of Leeuwarden, where Mata Hari was came into the world in 1876, and the Netherlands-based Mata Hari Foundation, yesterday claimed that the dossier against her was pitted with falsifications and was insufficient to warrant her conviction and execution. The delegation claimed that documents recently released by the British intelligence agency MI5 might help support their case that she was not guilty of the spying charges for which she was convicted in 1917 – or at least that she was hardly the im
