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Block thrown from bridge kills mother of two

A 33-year-old mother of two was killed on Sunday when an unknown person threw a wooden block from a motorway bridge. The block crashed through the windshield and hit the woman, who was sitting in the passenger seat.

Published: 24 March 2008 12:37 CET

Also traveling in the car were the victim’s husband and two children, aged seven and nine. They were not injured, but are suffering from severe shock.

The perpetrator fled the scene on the A29 motorway near Oldenburg in the German state of Lower Saxony. He is wanted for murder. The police have assigned 14 officers to the investigation and are working on the assumption that there was no relationship between the killer and the family.

According to the police, a similar incident occurred along the same stretch of the A29 several years ago when a stone crashed through the window of a moving vehicle. That time, there were no injuries as no one was sitting in the passenger seat.

German police swoop on gang of foreign dating scammers

The Black Axe gang was involved internationally in “multiple areas of criminal activity”, with a focus in Germany on romance scams and money-laundering, Bavarian police said in a statement.

The dating trick was a “modern form of marriage fraud”, police said.

“Using false identities, the fraudsters for example signalled their intention to marry and in the course of further contact repeatedly demand money under various pretexts,” police said.

The money was subsequently transferred to Black Axe in Nigeria “via financial agents”, authorities said.

In the process, the gang used a “commodity-based money laundering” scheme where products, often with a seeming “charitable purpose” were bought and delivered to Nigeria.

Some 450 cases of romance scamming had been reported in the region of Bavaria in 2023 alone, with the damages rising to 5.3 million euros ($5.7 million), police said.

The suspects, who all held Nigerian citizenship and were aged between 29 and 53, were arrested in nationwide raids on Tuesday.

Law enforcement swooped on 19 properties, including both homes and asylum shelters, police said.

The Black Axe gang had “strict hierarchical structures under leadership in Nigeria” operating different territorial units, police said.

The group had a “significant influence” on politics and public administrations, in particular in Nigeria.

Globally, the gang’s main areas of operation were “human-trafficking, fraud, money-laundering, prostitution and drug-trafficking”.

Black Axe operated under the cover of the Neo Black Movement of Africa, an ostensibly charitable organisation used as “camouflage” for the gang’s structures.

The action against Black Axe was the first of its kind in Germany, police said.

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