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CRIME

Police stage nationwide raids against child porn suspects

German prosecutors said Thursday they had carried out nationwide raids against people believed to possess child pornography, targeting nearly 70 prime suspects.

Published: 20 July 2017 14:03 CEST
Police stage nationwide raids against child porn suspects
Photo: DPA

State prosecutors in the western city of Frankfurt said in a statement that the searches of the suspects' homes, coordinated by the federal police force, were conducted over the last two weeks.

Officers confiscated evidence including computers and hard drives.

“The 67 suspects — ranging in age from 18 to 80 — are believed to have illegally used the internet service 'Chatstep' to exchange pornographic images and videos of children,” the prosecutors said.

They hailed the cooperation with US-based online group chat service Chatstep, which it noted was required under US law to report all cases of child pornography.

The raids come two weeks after German prosecutors announced they had smashed a major international online child pornography platform used to organise sexual abuse of children and arrested its suspected administrator.

The site known as “Elysium” had 87,000 members who traded images and video files of “the most serious sexual abuse of children, including babies,” prosecutors said on July 6th.

Darknet sites like the one uncovered in the case are invisible to most internet users and can only be accessed by using encryption technology.

They have repeatedly been used by criminals to trade drugs, weapons and child pornography.

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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