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NorthAfter a series of robberies in Cologne and Frankfurt, the alleged perpetrator was arrested in the Netherlands. According to information from the German Press Agency, the 60-year-old German is said to be Reemtsma’s kidnapper, Thomas Drach. Initially, “bild.de” reported about it.
The investigating authorities did not initially confirm this. They only spoke of a “defendant from the Rhineland who has no permanent residence in Germany and who was wanted throughout Europe.” The Prosecutor’s Office has requested the extradition of the sixty-year-old to Germany.
From the investigators’ point of view, it has now been confirmed that it was a series of robberies. It is said that the defendant not only committed the act in Frankfurt in which the money courier was seriously injured by gunfire in November 2019. He is also responsible for two more robberies in Cologne in March 2018 and March 2019. He is charged with three cases of serious joint robbery and a violation of the War Arms Control Law; the author is said to have used a machine gun in the attack on the Cologne-Bonn airport
Suspicious connection from the beginning
Cologne police said at least two perpetrators were involved in the three raids, “that is, driver and passenger,” a spokesman said. The Commission of Inquiry (EK) based at the Cologne Police Headquarters is still looking for this second man. The EK was formed after the first attack in Cologne-Godorf on March 24, 2018. On the first trace of Drach, whose identity the police did not want to officially confirm for tactical reasons, the EK was only after the evaluation of the recordings of video of March 6, 2019 committed the second act at Cologne / Bonn airport and the subsequent “costly investigation, partly undercover”.
Finally, the investigators also managed to identify the getaway car with which the perpetrators fled to the Netherlands after this theft of the money van. The vehicle could even be insured. If this was before the third and final act on November 9, 2019 in Frankfurt, it was initially open. In any case, the Cologne investigators managed to identify Drach and find his whereabouts in the Netherlands. The Cologne District Court eventually issued a European arrest warrant. Dutch police arrested him on Tuesday morning in Amsterdam. “The investigation is far from over,” the spokesman said.
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The suspicion that there might be a connection between these acts had arisen immediately after the attack in Frankfurt. Then the acts were carried out according to the same pattern. In all three cases, the perpetrators were traveling with stolen and false license plates in the Netherlands. They eventually set fire to the getaway car near the crime scene and continued to flee in a second car. After the robbery at the Cologne-Bonn airport, the murder weapon, an AK47 assault rifle, was found in the completely burned-out Audi.
After the brutal raids, members of the former terrorist left-wing Red Army Faction (RAF) were repeatedly suspected of being involved in the acts. Two men and one woman are wanted, among other things, for a series of twelve robberies between 1999 and 2016. All three are said to have attacked a money transporter in the Diepholz district of Lower Saxony. On Tuesday it was said from the EK Cologne that the suspicions about a participation of the RAF trio in the robberies of Ikea “have not been confirmed in the investigation”.
The alleged serial robber Drach was the mastermind behind the kidnapping of patron Jan Philipp Reemtsma, heir to the eponymous cigarette manufacturer. The kidnappers had extorted an amount in the millions, at that time still in German marks. In 1998 Thomas Drach was captured in Argentina and sentenced to fourteen and a half years in prison in Hamburg in late 2000.
