About raids, summonses and arrests in Munich and Salzburg in February 2025
(Translated from de.indymedia, April 17, 2025)
What happened?
On February 26, 2025, in and around Munich and in the Salzburg region, four homes, meeting places and storage facilities were raided by the cops on the orders of the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office. In the days that followed, further raids were carried out. As far as we know at present, these operations targeted four defendants and witnesses in three different proceedings for encouragement/approval of criminal acts, for forming a criminal organization and for the initial suspicion of participation in incendiary attacks (See : About the repressive operation in Germany and Austria. Solidarity with the arrested anarchists). During the searches, various computers, printers, storage media, telephones and magazines were seized.
Two of the four defendants were remanded in custody on the grounds that they had no home address. According to press reports, the charges are not sufficient to warrant the arrest of the other two defendants. In addition, witnesses have been summoned by the Munich public prosecutor’s office. It is not yet possible for us to assess which investigation procedures are involved in these summonses, what cross-referencing the cops are doing between which investigations, and whether they have any significant findings at all.
The people concerned and their supporters must now face up to the incarceration, prepare for the interrogations to come, and the trials that are likely to follow, as well as organize support for those in prison. We send them greetings of solidarity and strength for the times ahead.
What are the proceedings based on?
The proceedings are rather complicated. We’d like to try and describe them briefly here, although for the moment we can only do so on the basis of posts on indymedia and newspaper articles. For a better understanding, it may help to first summarize what came before these operations: for several years and with great regularity, vehicles, construction machinery, trains, construction equipment, buildings, cable shafts and cell towers have been burning in and around Munich. All this has resulted in material damage now running into the tens of millions. Most of these actions were not accompanied by a claim, but some were. According to the local press, the cops have been unable to find any exploitable trace to identify the perpetrators of any of the actions. They only assume that the fires are not the result of random self-combustion and have something to do with “critical infrastructures” in the broadest sense of the term. In January 2025, 23 vans belonging to Munich’s canine police brigade burned down in an unguarded parking lot. The damage amounted to over two million euros. That’s our brief summary of the situation.
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