display
The police in Berlin raided a criminal network early Thursday morning.
As the "Bild" newspaper and the "Spiegel" report, the investigators searched more than 20 apartments and houses in the city as well as a warehouse in Brandenburg.
At least two people were arrested.
The network is said to be responsible for large-scale drug trafficking, war weapons trafficking, and assault.
According to reports, the blow was also directed against a member of the Arab-born Remmo clan.
According to "Spiegel" a clan member who was born in Beirut is the main suspect in the proceedings.
He was arrested.
The man is said to have come to Berlin with his family from Lebanon in 1982 and already became conspicuous as a teenager.
In 1995 he was sentenced to a youth prison term of more than four years for trafficking in no small amount of heroin.
The authorities had confirmed that he was “poorly integrated into the local culture” and asked him to leave Germany “for reasons of public safety”.
However, the deportation has failed for 25 years due to a lack of travel documents from his home country.
According to "Spiegel" and "Bild", the findings about the criminal network are mainly based on cracked crypto cell phones with which the suspects are said to have communicated.
The Federal Criminal Police Office has been evaluating chat messages from Encrochat customers for around a year.
The Dutch company has offered criminals encrypted phones with a special messenger service for years.
The data traffic went through a server in France.
According to "Spiegel", Encrochat had around 60,000 customers in over 120 countries, and investigators are said to have called the service, which has since been discontinued, "WhatsApp for gangsters".
display
The gang against whom the raid was directed is said to have regularly packed drugs in barrels in a warehouse in Brandenburg and transported them to Berlin.
Several hundred emergency services and special forces were involved in the measures on Thursday morning, as the police announced on Twitter.
According to "Bild", the tax investigation was also on site.
The police initially reported that the background to the searches was a dispute between people of Arab and Chechen origin in November 2020 and investigations by the Public Prosecutor's Office into arms and drug trafficking and investigations by the tax office.
Here you will find content from Twitter
In order to interact with or display content from Twitter and other social networks, we need your consent.
Activate social networks
I consent to content from social networks being displayed to me.
This allows personal data to be transmitted to third party providers.
This may require the storage of cookies on your device.
More information can be found here.