They foresee more arrests for coup plan

Berlin/Bad Lobenstein. Germany expects more arrests in connection with an alleged far-right plan to overthrow the government, adding to the 25 made on Wednesday, including a self-styled prince, a retired military paratrooper and a judge.

The group planning to attack Germany’s democratic institutions was heavily armed and potentially dangerous, the criminal police chief said.

“We have a dangerous mix of people with irrational convictions, some with lots of money, some with guns and a plan they want to put into action. […] That is why it is dangerous and that is why we have intervened,” the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), Holger Münch, told the public broadcaster ARD.

“The raids also show it, with weapons discovered in 50 of the registered places, from crossbows to rifles and ammunition and it shows that this is not something harmless,” he said.

According to him, more arrests could be made. “We have identified other people, but we don’t know exactly what their status is in relation to the group,” he said.

The investigation concerns 54 people. Of those, 25 were arrested during a raid Wednesday morning. The cell was a follower of the ideology of the “Reichsbürger”, the “Citizens of the Reich”, an extremist movement that gained strength as a result of sanitary restrictions.

The court suspects that they made “concrete preparations to violently enter the Bundestag [la cámara baja del parlamento] with a small armed group,” reported the Prosecutor’s Office.

“It is not to be supposed that a group of a few dozen [de miembros]perhaps a few hundred, is in a position to really question the German state system,” Münch clarified.

The group had been under surveillance “since spring [boreal] this year,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (internal intelligence), on RTL.

According to him, they had “plans to overthrow the government, plans to set the overthrow in motion.”

According to him, the Reichsbürger movement has about 21,000 supporters. “We estimate that 10% are prone to violence,” he said.

isolated hunting lodge

German investigators in the small eastern town of Bad Lobenstein on Thursday searched a secluded 19th-century hunting lodge owned by a local aristocrat at the center of the coup plot.

The police surrounded the Waidmannsheil hunting lodge, owned by Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss, located on the outskirts of the city, in a wooded area, on suspicion that it served as a weapons depot and meeting point in the coup plan.