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Woman flees with a stranger’s baby 250 km away to Hanover

A woman has been arrested after snatching a baby from her mother in Potsdam and fleeing to Lower Saxony.

Published: 11 August 2017 11:35 CEST

Woman flees with a stranger's baby 250 km away to Hanover

File photo: DPA.

The 19-year-old woman had approached the baby’s 35-year-old mother while she was grocery shopping with her three children on Thursday afternoon, police report.

The younger woman offered to take care of the mother’s four-month-old baby girl, who was in a carriage, while the mother brought her groceries into her flat.

When the mother returned, her baby and the woman had disappeared. The mother then called the police, who launched an extensive search with dogs, helicopters and emergency officers.

Police eventually found that the 19-year-old had fled to Lower Saxony with the baby – around 250 kilometres away from Potsdam.

Several hours later at around 8pm on Thursday, the woman was arrested in Hanover, police reported. The baby was found unharmed.

Due to organizational complications, however, the mother could not be reunited with her baby until Friday morning, a police spokesman said.

Police also reported that the 19-year-old had acted alone and did not make any demands.

Investigators so far do not believe that the woman and mother knew each other previously, and the motive behind the crime thus far remains unclear.

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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