Bottrop.
Almost every night somewhere in Germany an ATM is blown up. Therefore, it becomes difficult to get cash on New Year’s Eve.
If you want to pick up cash spontaneously on New Year’s Eve, you’ll have a problem. Because of the growing risk of ATMs being blown up, the Sparkasse has dismantled freely accessible machines and is closing its self-service offers at night. The Deutsche Bank on Osterfelder Strasse does the same. Deutsche Bank gave up its self-service branch on the main street in Kirchhellen, which was blown up in August 2020, without replacement after the crime.
The caution of the banks has a very real background, especially these days. On Friday morning alone, the police authorities registered ATM demolitions in Viersen, Braunschweig and Verden an der Aller. Bank branches were hit twice, in Verden an ATM on the outside facade.
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The Sparkasse Bottrop has already dismantled these freely accessible machines on buildings on the urgent recommendation of the State Criminal Police Office and now closes the self-service areas in their branches between midnight and five in the morning. From January, Sparkasse Essen will go one step further and close its self-service branches in the neighborhood from 10 p.m.
More and more ATMs are being blown up in NRW
Because the number of demolitions of ATMs is increasing in NRW. In the first six months of 2022, criminals have already blown up 105 ATMs in NRW. They caused total damage of more than ten million euros. And the risk to the environment is also growing. In August 2020, the perpetrators blew up the machine in Kirchhellen with gas; bad enough.
In the meantime, however, the State Criminal Police Office of North Rhine-Westphalia has been reporting increasingly dangerous explosive methods: Since 2015, the investigators from “EK Heat” have been tracking down the Dutch-Moroccan group of perpetrators. They report that the perpetrators are arming themselves: “In 2021, more than two-thirds of the crimes in NRW were committed using so-called lightning bang bodies.” using explosives.”
In the meantime, the perpetrators even blew up twice
In the meantime, the perpetrators have even blown up twice: first a hole in the machine, then the second load goes into it. The investigators describe the consequences as follows: “Due to the significantly higher explosive effect, buildings and the surrounding infrastructure are regularly damaged, with incalculable dangers for uninvolved third parties and the forces deployed. In the case of a large number of explosions, the fire brigade and structural engineer must be consulted afterwards in order to assess whether there is a risk of the buildings involved collapsing. In the case of detonations, a high fragmentation effect, the sometimes large-scale export of large and heavy pieces of debris and a larger radius of the damage field can be expected.
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EK Heat investigators have arrested 161 perpetrators so far. They come from a group of up to 700 criminals living in and around Utrecht, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Perpetrator profile predominantly male, between 18 and 35 years old. After the blasts, the criminals prefer to flee with high-powered stolen cars via the next freeway entrance.
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