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CRIME

Poker bandit turns himself in to police

Eleven days after armed robbers snatched €242,000 from a poker game in a daring heist at Berlin’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, one of the culprits has turned himself into police.

Poker bandit turns himself in to police
Photo: DPA

The authorities confirmed on Wednesday that the 21-year-old man turned up at a police station with his attorney earlier this week. He then admitted he was one of the four masked men who crashed the high-stakes poker game with handguns and machetes and made off with part of the prize pot.

The man has been held in custody since, but has reportedly so far refused to reveal the whereabouts of the stolen money.

According to the Berliner Morgenpost daily, he had given the address where at least some of his accomplices were staying. Armed police stormed the property Tuesday but found it empty.

However, it seems unlikely they will be at large much longer.

“We know exactly who we’re looking for. Sooner or later we’ll have the lot of them in our net,” one investigator told Bild.

The men had burst into the hotel at Potsdamer Platz at 2:15 pm on March 6, overrunning security guards and causing panic among the roughly 400 contestants in the European Poker Tour Tournament.

A security guard managed to disarm one of the men, grab a bag full of money and hold the man in a headlock, but he was freed by his accomplices. It was this man, widely seen in pictures over the past 11 days, that was arrested Tuesday, Bild reported.

The men then fled without their masks. They were filmed leaving and also left behind fingerprints and DNA evidence at the scene.

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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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