Tag Archives: German Police

Germany bomber influenced in chat by unknown person

Police secure the area after an explosion in Ansbach, Germany,

BERLIN (Reuters) – A Syrian asylum seeker who blew himself up in the southern German town of Ansbach on Sunday was influenced by an unknown person in a chat conversation on his mobile phone, Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said on Wednesday.

“It’s possible to deduce that another person wherever they were at the time of the call, of the chat, significantly influenced how the attacker acted,” Herrmann said on the sidelines of a meeting of the Bavarian cabinet.

“The chat ended directly before the attack,” he added.

The 27-year-old Syrian, who had arrived in Germany two years ago, set off explosives in his rucksack on Sunday outside a musical festival in Ansbach, a town of 40,000 people southwest of Nuremberg, killing himself and injuring 15 people.

Police are trying to find out whether the attacker had help making the bomb and whether it exploded prematurely, which could suggest he wanted to kill as many people as possible.

“There are indications that the attacker did not want to ignite the bomb at this moment,” a spokesman for the Bavarian Interior Ministry said.

The attack on Sunday was the fourth act of violence by men of Middle Eastern or Asian origin against German civilians in a week and is likely to fuel growing unease about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy.

More than a million migrants entered Germany over the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

Investigators found a video on the Ansbach bomber’s mobile phone in which he pledged allegiance to militant group Islamic State, which later claimed responsibility for the bombing.

On searching his room, Nuremberg police found diesel, hydrochloric acid, alcohol, batteries, paint thinner and pebbles — the same materials used in the bomb — and computer images and film clips linked to Islamic State.

(Reporting by Reuters TV and Joern Poltz; Writing by Caroline Copley; Editing by Catherine Evans)

After mass shooting, German Police focus on “dark net” crime

An investigator of the Cybercrime Intelligence Unit of Germany's Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) Federal Crime Office is pictured during a media day in Wiesbaden

By Frank Siebelt

WIESBADEN, Germany (Reuters) – German police will do more to fight crime committed on the “dark net”, they said on Wednesday, days after a gunman killed nine people with a weapon bought on that hidden part of the internet.

“We see that the dark net is a growing trading place and therefore we need to prioritize our investigations here,” Holger Muench, head of Germany’s Federal Police (BKA), told journalists as he presented the latest annual report on cyber crime.

The dark net, which is only accessible via special web browsers, is increasingly used to procure drugs, weapons and counterfeit money, allowing users to trade anonymously and pay with digital currencies such as Bitcoin, the BKA said.

The man who killed nine people at a shopping mall in Munich on Friday was a local 18-year-old obsessed with mass killings who had bought his reactivated 9mm Glock 17 pistol on the dark web, Bavarian officials said.

The BKA said it had taken five market places in the dark net out of circulation last year. Muench said the BKA did not just want to take the sites offline but also catch criminals using them.

Cyber crime cost Germany 40.5 million euros ($44.5 million) last year, the BKA’s report said, a rise of 2.8 percent. Most of the more than 45,000 cases involved computer fraud.

Muench said the figures only represented a small part of the true size of cyber crime.

“If we look ahead we see little relief,” he said. “Cyber crime is still a growing phenomenon – you could say almost a growing business, even a growing industry.”

Police solved 32.8 percent of cyber crime last year, Muench said, adding that many crimes do not get past the exploratory phase and others go unnoticed or are not reported.

(Writing and additional reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)