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Mother gagged and buried in concrete

Police found the body of a young mother set in concrete and buried in a hole in a garden in western Germany on Tuesday. They arrested her stepfather, with whom she is believed to have had a child.

Published: 20 February 2014 09:48 CET

Mother gagged and buried in concrete

Investigators search the site on Wednesday. Photo: DPA

Police identified the 23-year-old woman as Madeleine W., and said on Wednesday she could have been alive when she was thrown into the concrete in a pit more than a metre deep.

They said they were certain she had suffocated, either before or after being buried in Essen, North-Rhine Westphalia.

Her stepfather, 47, and half-brother, 21, have been arrested on suspicion of murder and are in custody.

Police murder commissioner Eckhard Harms said a “serious breakdown in the family” could be the motive for the alleged murder.

The stepfather from Essen has been under investigation for more than a year on suspicion of sexually abusing his stepdaughter, prosecutors said.

It is believed he is the father of his stepdaughter’s two-year-old child.

The mother disappeared last Tuesday after dropping her daughter off at the local kindergarten.

The body was found after police noticed freshly dug ground around a gazebo in the garden. She was buried more than one metre in the ground and covered with two layers of concrete and earth.

READ MORE: CDU politician shot dead in garage

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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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