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CRIME

Police mull DNA tests for teens after autobahn murder

German police investigating the death of a woman that occurred after someone threw a wooden block from a motorway bridge are considering forcing 1,200 teens in the area to take a DNA test, regional daily Nordwest Zeitung reported on Friday.

Police mull DNA tests for teens after autobahn murder
The police sketch of possible suspects. Photo: DPA

Police in the German state of Lower Saxony might ask all 16 to 20-year-olds in the Oldenburg area to take a saliva test, the paper reported.

Investigators believe that a group of young people, among them a girl with a ponytail and a boy in a baseball cap and light-colored jacket, were on the bridge around the time the crime occurred.

After police released a sketch of the suspects and German broadcaster ZDF called for witnesses to come forward, the police special task force has received more than 230 new leads in the case.

“A concrete suspect has yet to be found,” said police spokesperson Sascha Weiß on Thursday evening.

A 33-year-old mother of two was killed when an unknown person threw a 6-kilogramme wooden block from a motorway bridge on the A29 motorway near Oldenburg. The block crashed through the windshield and hit the woman, who was sitting in the passenger seat. Also traveling in the car were the victim’s husband and two children, aged seven and nine. They were not injured.

The perpetrators fled the scene and are wanted for murder.

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.

CRIME

German police swoop on gang of foreign dating scammers

German police said Wednesday they had arrested 11 suspected members of a Nigerian mafia group behind a large-scale dating scam.

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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