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Police arrest 19-year-old in Michelle murder case

A 19-year-old has been arrested after turning himself into police for the murder of 8-year-old Leipzig girl Michelle, the Leipziger Volkszeitung reported on Monday.

Published: 9 March 2009 14:27 CET

Police arrest 19-year-old in Michelle murder case

Photo: DPA

The area around the young man’s Reudnitz-Thonberg-district home – about one kilometre away from where Michelle was found dead – was sealed off and searched by police after he went to police on Sunday.

Michelle went missing after playing with friends on August 18, 2008. Three days later her body was found by a local resident out for a walk.

Despite thousands of tips, police found few clues leading to the murderer. Police have questioned more than 1,000 witnesses and investigated 1,700 leads, collecting some 5,200 pieces of evidence. The 75-officer special investigation team has also taken voluntary saliva DNA samples from friends, neighbours and relatives of the girl.

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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