Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

CRIME

Police make biggest ever cocaine bust

German police said Tuesday they had seized a record haul of 1.3 tonnes of cocaine with an estimated street value of €40 million and made seven arrests.

Published: 14 April 2010 08:31 CEST
Police make biggest ever cocaine bust
Photo: DPA

“This is the biggest amount of cocaine ever seized in Germany,” police said in a statement.

Customs officers discovered the drugs on Monday when searching pallets of wood briquettes in Hamburg, Germany’s biggest port.

Thirty-one of the 32 pallets searched also contained packets of cocaine “very professionally hidden” among the briquettes, the police said.

Officials seized a total of 1,244 packets of “very high purity” cocaine imported from Paraguay.

The seven suspects, aged between 27 and 35, were arrested in connection with the bust. Six of them were already behind bars on Tuesday, a police spokesman said.

The two main suspects are a Paraguayan citizen, 35, who lives in Hamburg and a 31-year-old German citizen of Turkish origin.

Some 200 police officers followed up with 19 searches in Hamburg and the German states of Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia. At the home of one 28-year-old suspect, police said they found €450,000 in cash.

Police said they became aware of the international cocaine trafficking network following a small three-kilo cocaine bust and arrests in November.

Police have also identified the cocaine dealers in Paraguay who were involved in concealing the drug in the pallets of wood briquettes, which were shipped from Asuncion to Hamburg.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

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.

SHOW COMMENTS