Around 450 ATMs were blown up nationwide this year. This is a high point for the crime. This is reported by WELT AM SONNTAG, citing participants in the Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK), which took place in Munich until Friday. In previous years, significantly fewer machines had been blown up – 414 in 2020 and 381 in 2021. Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD), who is also spokesman for the SPD-led states, spoke of 500 “completed and attempted crimes” nationwide in 2022.
The crimes have recently been increasingly committed with explosives, the IMK said. This is a new and worrying development: criminals used to use gas mixtures for attacks. For the money stolen, dead people would be accepted. Oliver Huth, state chairman of the Association of German Criminal Investigators (BDK) in North Rhine-Westphalia, told WELT AM SONNTAG that people in the vicinity of the crime scene were in acute danger: “Pedestrians have already been injured, metal parts have hit children’s rooms and houses were no longer habitable.”
According to Pistorius, more and more criminals from the Netherlands are now committing their crimes in Germany. The reason: Unlike in the neighboring country, banks in Germany would forgo the use of adhesive techniques, with which banknotes are pasted up and unusable when they are blown up. Both Huth and the interior ministers called for more commitment to machine protection. Pistorius even threatened to legally oblige the banks to do so.