Public prosecutor's office - Suspect identified after years of blackmail
A 70-year-old man from the Hanover area is allegedly responsible for a 31-year-long series of extortion attempts. As the public prosecutor's office and the criminal investigation department reported on Thursday in Kempten, the suspect is said to have threatened food manufacturers and hotel operators throughout Germany with a letter bomb in at least around 360 cases using handwritten postcards.
The sender demanded 500,000 euros in each case, but did not get in touch afterwards. The series began in 1992. According to the police, the only change in the otherwise unchanged blackmail cards since then was the currency conversion in 2002. Previously, the blackmailer had demanded one million marks.
The suspect remains silent about the accusations. "The motive is still completely unclear," said Josef Ischwang, head of the Kempten criminal investigation department. How serious the alleged perpetrator was in carrying out his threat is also the subject of the investigation.
Car registration numbers, which the suspect is said to have noted on the postcards, pose further puzzles for the investigators. "The only thing they have in common is that the cars were in the Hanover area," says Ischwang. They are not connected to the threatened companies. According to the police, there are currently no indications that the 70-year-old is mentally ill.
Investigators were put on the man's trail because the postcards were sent in the Hanover area. The criminal investigation department in Kempten became active after two blackmail cards were sent to companies in the Allgäu region in April of this year. One was sent to a food manufacturer in Ostallgäu and another to a hotel in Oberallgäu.
Based on the hypothesis of the Kempten police that the man was also sending other mail, the officers in Lower Saxony had mail items monitored in a distribution center and successfully matched the handwriting on the envelopes with the blackmail letters. They were then able to prove that the DNA of the suspect, who had previously been inconspicuous under criminal law, matched traces found on 70 postcards.
It is not yet known how many of the 360 cases are already time-barred. According to the police, it also remains to be seen whether more will be added. "It is possible that further acts are only now being reported or that individual cases in the series have not yet been assigned," said a police spokesperson. The suspected blackmailer is at large because, according to the public prosecutor's office, there is no risk of absconding.
Press release
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Source: www.stern.de
