Lawyer Sebas Diekstra said he had filed the request with the Openbaar Ministerie, The Netherland’s public prosecutor’s service yesterday.
He told FMT that despite the case taking place in Malaysia, Smit was a Dutch national and the government was obliged to investigate the death of its citizens.
“She was Dutch, so the duty is on The Netherlands government to investigate the circumstances of her sudden death. Especially in the country in which she died in.
“Hence, we have called the public prosecutor to investigate her death.
“This is similar to how the Dutch government investigated the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the skies of Ukraine, where Dutch citizens perished,” Diekstra said today.
Family members have confirmed the model was not Dutch-Belgian, as earlier reported.
FMT has contacted The Netherlands’ Public Information Service for official comment on Diekstra’s application.
Smit, 18, was found sprawled nude on the sixth floor of an apartment in downtown Kuala Lumpur on Dec 7.
Police believe she was intoxicated at the time. Smit was said to have been in the apartment of a couple — an American man and his Kazakh wife.
It was reported that she had been out drinking with the couple in Bangsar before her death and returned to the couple’s apartment on the 20th floor.
Smit had moved to Malaysia when she was 3 and lived for 13 years in Penang with her grandparents.
Police have classified the case as sudden death pending post-mortem and pathology tests.
Diekstra, a military man turned lawyer, is well-known in The Netherlands for helping families of those who have died under suspicious circumstances.
He took to live TV last week, saying the Malaysian investigation into the case was “poor” as police had immediately classified it as sudden death.
Smit’s body was brought back to The Netherlands for a second post-mortem last week, with results expected in the first week of January.
The Smit family is now pinning its hopes on hiring Mark Williams-Thomas, an award-winning British investigative reporter and criminologist to head to KL in search of the truth.
They have begun a crowdfunding effort to raise 18,000 Euros (about RM87,000) to hire Wiliams-Thomas.