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CRIME

Police arrest three men for blowing up ATMs

Three men have been arrested in Berlin on suspicion of blowing up several cash machines since February, German police reported on Tuesday.

Published: 11 November 2008 17:01 CET
Police arrest three men for blowing up ATMs
A file photo of an April ATM explosion in Hesse. Photo: DPA

Officers from the state office of criminal investigation entered a Berlin apartment at 7 am and arrested the suspects, who are believed to have destroyed cash machines in across Schleswig-Holstein and Brandenburg.

Police caught on to the men, aged 30 to 36-years-old, after they left clues behind at a crime scene in Dithmarschen. Two of the suspects live in Brunsbüttel, Schleswig-Holstein, where authorities simultaneously searched for evidence.

“The men are suspected of igniting a gas mixture to explode the machines, which in every case caused extensive damage to the buildings where they were housed,” said the joint statement from the Schleswig-Holstein LKA and the prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe, where the suspects were taken for questioning.

Despite making a lot of noise and causing property damage with the blasts, the unlucky suspects were often unable to reach their goal of removing actual cash from the machines.

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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