exclusive
A group of cybercriminals from Germany is probably responsible for many of the recent threatening letters related to the Middle East war. According to research by Contrasts and “Spiegel” she was already noticed before. There are no signs of a political motive.
Bombs will be planted in every Palestinian and Arab building, according to a threatening letter in English. They have explosives worth around 20 million euros.
This email is in the hands of the ARD political magazine Contrasts and the “mirror”. Last Saturday it was received at the Palestinian Mission in Berlin at 8:06 p.m. It was the beginning of a series of bomb threats that has since caused uncertainty nationwide. A large number of schools that received similar letters were evacuated.
In addition to public institutions and foreign embassies, the SPD party headquarters and a whole range of media outlets were also affected, including ARD current in Hamburg and the ZDF headquarters in Mainz. 600 employees had to leave the building on Monday and the current television program was interrupted.
Apparently not a political motive
The authors of the emails either posed as pro-Israel terrorists or as supporters of the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas. According to research by Contrasts and “Spiegel” they probably do not pursue any political goals, but rather wanted to spread fear and attract attention with the threats. The authors are apparently a group of men from Germany who have already attracted attention in the past in the area of cybercrime.
Among other things, the internet trolls are said to have made false emergency calls, triggering police and fire service operations on their victims. Contrasts and “Spiegel” there are indications that the group could have used the emergency call app “Nora” for this purpose. The app made it possible to make emergency calls to the police and fire departments directly via smartphone. The North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of the Interior is responsible for the app. After a number of abusive emergency calls, it had its software removed from the app stores in September. Politicians and celebrities were among those affected at the time.
Threats in Hebrew and Arabic
With the series of bomb threats, the group is now clearly accepting that it will further fuel the war in the Middle East – as was the case with the email from supposed Israel supporters to the Palestinian Mission. “We don’t care if children or women die as long as we win this war,” the authors of the letter claim. Some of these and other threatening emails are written in Hebrew. Since Sunday at the latest, letters from supposed Hamas supporters have been circulating in German and English as well as passages in bad Arabic.
Contrasts and “Spiegel” there are numerous emails from this series. According to the research, they were sent using disposable addresses from different email providers. There are overlaps in the senders, as well as in the content: wording is often strikingly similar, and sometimes entire passages are identical. “We are pleased to announce that we will bomb your building,” they say – and again and again: “Fuck Germany!” The threats repeatedly end with the phrase “bloody greetings.”
Action by free riders
According to information from Contrasts and “Spiegel”, the Berlin police are dealing with, among other things, threatening emails to the SPD, the Algerian embassy and the Palestinian Mission. According to investigators, she considers the letters to be an act of free riders. She is investigating charges of disturbing the public peace by threatening to commit crimes.
The police of the individual federal states have so far been responsible for the respective investigations, although according to the research there is much to suggest that a central group is responsible for the nationwide series. Security authorities should also investigate such suspicions.