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German woman found stabbed to death on Italian motorway

Italian police are investigating the murder of a German woman whose body was found next to a motorway in the Calabria region on Saturday.

Published: 6 December 2009 11:20 CET

German woman found stabbed to death on Italian motorway

Photo: DPA

The 40-year-old woman had been stabbed to death, Italian newspapers reported on Sunday, but they also said that the woman had been dead for two days before her body was found.

She was not killed on the motorway, but her body had been dumped next to the road not far from the town of Cosenza.

Detectives have told Turin-based newspaper La Stampa that the woman, named only as Petra S., had a surprising amount of personal documentation with her.

The handbag found with her body contained not only a purse with money in it, but also bank documents, savings books, credit cards and a number of letters written to people in Germany.

The Italian police have released a photograph of the woman in an appeal for information.

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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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