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Flaming toilets injure 8 at Wacken heavy metal festival

A heavy metal festival in Wacken, Germany got fired up on Friday, but not from the show. Unknown perpetrators set the portable toilets on fire.

Published: 1 August 2008 16:53 CEST

Flaming toilets injure 8 at Wacken heavy metal festival

A metal fan who was probably too lit to light the fire. Photo: DPA

Authorities had to rescue 12 people sleeping in nearby tents, a police spokesperson said, adding that eight people were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation.

PHOTO GALLERY: Click here to view photos of the Wacken heavy metal festival.

Police believe the fire was arson and the festival organizers have set a €1,000 reward in exchange for the identity of the homegrown pyrotechnics artist.

Some 70,000 metalheads are rocking out to 70 hard rocking bands at the sold-out Wacken Open Air festival in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Iron Maiden is headlining the self-proclaimed world’s largest metal festival, which invades the tiny town of just 1,900 each year.

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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