Police and the Dresden public prosecutor’s office searched several apartments on Tuesday morning about a year after the jewelery was stolen from the Green Vault and arrested three suspects from the clan milieu. More than 1,600 officers were deployed in the large-scale raid. There may be traffic disruptions in Neukölln.
According to Tagesspiegel information, 1638 officials are on duty. In addition to forces from Saxony, special forces from the federal government and the states of Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia have moved in.
A total of three urgent suspects were arrested. According to a spokesman, they are German citizens, according to Tagesspiegel information from security circles, all are members of the large German-Arab family Rammo.
The Dresden public prosecutor’s office accuses them of serious gang theft and arson. The accused are to be brought before an investigating judge on Tuesday.
The police searched a total of 18 objects from the early morning, including ten apartments, garages and vehicles. The investigators hope that the raid will help them to find traces of the stolen art treasures, and evidence such as storage media, clothing and tools are also being sought. At least two police helicopters circled over Neukölln and Kreuzberg.
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The country chief of the Police Union (GdP), Norbert Cioma, said: “Today’s large-scale operation has been prepared incredibly professionally and very meticulously.” .
In one of the most spectacular break-ins of the past decades, on November 25, 2019 in Dresden, strangers stole art treasures of inestimable value from the famous treasury of the Green Vault. The perpetrators had gained access to the museum through a barred window. They partially severed the bars, removed the windows and frames and penetrated the baroque treasury. There they stole diamonds and brilliant-cut diamonds worth several hundred million euros from the display cases that had been destroyed with an ax.
The perpetrators are said to have used a hydraulic spreader tool to break into the Green Vault. Therefore, the investigators also went from parallels to the theft of the 100 kilogram gold coin Big Maple Leaf, which was worth 3.75 million euros, from the Bode Museum in Berlin in March 2017. There were also parallels to the attack on a money transporter on Alexanderplatz 2018.
In Berlin, at least five of these devices, each worth 10,000 euros, had been stolen from the fire department since 2017. The fire brigade uses the battery-operated hydraulic spreaders to open car doors that are jammed after accidents. And precisely such a special tool, which is used by the fire brigade, was apparently used in the spectacular theft of jewels from the Green Vault in Dresden.
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Several companies in Neukölln had already been searched in mid-September. Data and business documents have been secured in several production sites where vehicles are wrapped in film. It is about the suspicion that the outside of the getaway car used by the perpetrators for the coup and later set on fire was altered. According to previous knowledge, the investigators assume that the contractors did not know the purpose.
At the beginning of September, the police came to search an internet café in Neukölln and the apartment of an employee there. The investigators of the Soko “Epaulette” found what they were looking for. The investigators assume that the man was in contact with the perpetrators. He is said to have got them SIM cards registered with fictitious personal data for cell phones. Investigators had confiscated business documents, cell phones and storage materials.
Criminal members of the extended Rammo family, or Remmo in another spelling, have already been noticed with several serious crimes. The Rammos became known because relatives are said to have killed a man in Britz in 2017 (for which the defendant was acquitted). Two cousins have been convicted of stealing the gold coin from the Bode Museum, one of which is already final. Previously, a family member blew up a savings bank.
Members of the extended family have tried to invest money in the hip north of the district in recent years. After years of investigations by the State Office of Criminal Investigation, in the summer of 2018 exactly 77 properties attributed to the family were confiscated on suspicion of money laundering.
