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A court in Amsterdam has ordered the extradition of Reemtsma kidnapper Thomas Drach to Germany and thus paved the way for a possible further trial against the 60-year-old in the Federal Republic.
"The extradition has been approved," said the Amsterdam District Court on Tuesday.
Drach is said to have committed three armed attacks on money transporters in Germany in 2018 and 2019 and will soon answer for them in court.
The Cologne public prosecutor assumes that Drach will be transferred to the Cologne penal institution within the next ten days. For security reasons, nothing could be communicated about the exact time and transport, said Chief Public Prosecutor Ulrich Bremer. Drach, who had lived in Amsterdam until his arrest, had not objected to the extradition.
The Reemtsma kidnapper was arrested on February 23 in the Netherlands on the basis of a European arrest warrant and has been in extradition custody in the neighboring country ever since.
Drach is said to have attacked the three money transporters with other perpetrators in Cologne-Godorf, at Cologne / Bonn Airport and in Frankfurt am Main.
The public prosecutor's office in Cologne accuses him of serious joint robbery in three cases as well as a violation of the War Weapons Control Act - he is said to have committed the attack at Cologne airport with a machine gun.
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Two money messengers were seriously injured by gunfire during this attack and the crime in Frankfurt.
In connection with two of the three acts of violence, an alleged accomplice Drachs was arrested in the Netherlands.
In all three robberies, the perpetrators fled with cars stolen in the Netherlands and fitted with false license plates, set them on fire not far from the crime scenes and continued the escape with other vehicles.
After the robbery at Cologne / Bonn Airport, investigators found the murder weapon, an AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle, in the completely burned-out car.
By evaluating the video recordings of the robbery at Cologne / Bonn Airport and subsequent partly undercover investigations, the prosecutors succeeded in identifying and confiscating an escape vehicle.
Drach faces another long prison sentence
Drach's name is inextricably linked with the kidnapping of the Hamburg patron Jan Philipp Reemtsma a quarter of a century ago - one of the most spectacular criminal cases in German post-war history.
For the Reemtsma kidnapping, Drach was sentenced to 14 years and six months in prison in 2000.
He was released in October 2013.
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Drach's kidnappers brought the heirs of the tobacco dynasty into their power on March 25, 1996 and kept him chained for 33 days in the cellar of a country house near Bremen.
On April 26, 1996, Reemtsma was released on payment of a tens of millions of dollars in ransom.
Drach then went into hiding, only in 1998 police officers put him in a luxury hotel in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires. After a lengthy legal tug-of-war, Drach was extradited to Hamburg and sentenced there. If convicted because of the van robberies, he is now facing another long prison sentence.