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CRIME

Berlin man arrested for attempted murder by gas explosion

Hamburg police have arrested a Berlin man who tried to blow up his Berlin apartment building last Friday, Berlin daily Berliner Morgenpost reported Wednesday.

Berlin man arrested for attempted murder by gas explosion
Photo: DPA

The 36-year-old Michael S. is accused of multiple cases of attempted murder for allegedly manipulating the gas connection and booby trapping his Dunckerstrasse 13 apartment in Berlin’s trendy Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood on July 18. Neighbors smelled the gas and called emergency services, who found that dozens of residents around the building were in danger.

The man had tampered with the gas connection and removed the glass from a light bulb. Had the light been turned on, an explosion would have inevitably occurred, police said.

He fled to Hamburg and was spotted in the city’s St. Pauli and Sternschanze districts, but police didn’t capture him until the early hours of Wednesday morning, the paper said.

The man was already known to police for getting into fights and damaging property.

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.

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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