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CRIME

Police arrest man after fast-food stand-off

UPDATE: A man threatened to set fire to a fast-food outlet in southern Germany on Thursday night with 12 people inside. The 14-hour stand-off ended on Friday morning when armed police stormed the restaurant.

Published: 25 October 2013 09:21 CEST
Police arrest man after fast-food stand-off
Photo: DPA

After forces entered the building in an industrial area of Freiburg, police said those with the 36-year-old man were family and friends trying to calm him down and not hostages.

The Turkish man claimed to be armed and to be carrying a flammable liquid.

Police said the hostage-taker was known to them.

Mediators spoke with the man overnight on the telephone but could not get any sense out of him.

The man has previously committed arms and drugs offences, police said.

On Thursday he was supposed to be in court over drug offences but never appeared. Instead he phoned the police and said he was prepared to do anything.

He was agitated apparently because he feared “consequences” of not showing up to court.

READ MORE: Father ‘shut baby girl in fridge for crying’

AFP/DPA/The Local/tsb

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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.

Published: 25 April 2024 09:35 CEST
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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