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CRIME

330 kg of heroin found in pickle shipment

Police in North Rhine-Westphalia seized a truck smuggling 330 kilogrammes of heroin being smuggled in with a 23-tonne shipment of pickled garlic and cucumbers, officials in Essen announced on Thursday.

Published: 9 October 2014 09:07 CEST
330 kg of heroin found in pickle shipment
Photo: BKA

Divided into 1.3 million doses, the heroin is estimated to have a street value of €50 million.

According to the Criminal Investigation Division (BKA), the shipment was discovered on September 22 in a truck that had travelled to Germany from Iran.

Two Syrian brothers, aged 30 and 35, were arrested in Essen and Cologne in September and are believed to have leading roles in the drug ring.

Both were suspected of owning businesses that were fronts for the import of heroin into Germany.

Their information led to the arrest of a Dutch man in Belgium and the eventual seizure of the truck.

The BKA believe that a Syrian-Iraqi drug ring has been smuggling large volumes of heroin into Western Europe, hidden in vegetable shipments, for years.

In all of 2013, the BKA confiscated 270 kilogrammes of heroin nationwide.

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CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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