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Police arrest three men for blowing up ATMs

Three men have been arrested in Berlin on suspicion of blowing up several cash machines since February, German police reported on Tuesday.

Published: 11 November 2008 17:01 CET

Police arrest three men for blowing up ATMs

A file photo of an April ATM explosion in Hesse. Photo: DPA

Officers from the state office of criminal investigation entered a Berlin apartment at 7 am and arrested the suspects, who are believed to have destroyed cash machines in across Schleswig-Holstein and Brandenburg.

Police caught on to the men, aged 30 to 36-years-old, after they left clues behind at a crime scene in Dithmarschen. Two of the suspects live in Brunsbüttel, Schleswig-Holstein, where authorities simultaneously searched for evidence.

“The men are suspected of igniting a gas mixture to explode the machines, which in every case caused extensive damage to the buildings where they were housed,” said the joint statement from the Schleswig-Holstein LKA and the prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe, where the suspects were taken for questioning.

Despite making a lot of noise and causing property damage with the blasts, the unlucky suspects were often unable to reach their goal of removing actual cash from the machines.

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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