Interview with Christa Lübbers, head of Soko BEGAS
Mrs. Lübbers, what do you know about the perpetrators of the ATM blasts?
Lübbers: The perpetrators who appear here in North Rhine-Westphalia are 18 to 35-year-old men who come from precarious backgrounds in the major Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht or Rotterdam. Many of them are of Arab descent, second to fourth generation immigrants. They get fast cars and money, have a certain "fame" through their actions and enjoy something like "their power on the street".
So we're talking about gangs, but who are the people behind them?
Lübbers: Not gangs in the criminal sense - because the organizers, the profiteers and the blasters do not form a common group. The profits are also not divided fairly among the participants later on. In terms of the underlying structure, we are talking about unscrupulous criminals who use these young men to make money for their criminal activities. We are talking about organized crime when we talk about the people behind it. In the Netherlands, the problem of ATMs being blown up has been tackled, but it has shifted. Now it's about extorting money and blowing up entire residential and commercial buildings.
That almost sounds like a hopeless battle for the police ...
Lübbers: This is primarily a socio-political problem. The explosives are young men who see no prospect of achieving a certain level of prosperity legally. They are easy to recruit for criminal activities. The Dutch have recognized this as an internal security problem, at the latest after the journalist Peter de Vries was killed and now Princess Amalia has also been threatened. There, the affected regions are working together in a triangle of competence consisting of the municipality, police and judiciary. This makes it all the more important for us as the neighboring state of North Rhine-Westphalia to invest a lot of manpower and demonstrate the limits of a democratic state at an early stage.