From Friday, six men who are said to have stolen jewels worth millions from the Green Vault will have to answer in court.
In an action worthy of a film, thieves destroyed window bars in November 2019 and cut off the power supply to the street lighting in front of Dresden’s Residenzschloss. They stole jewelery worth an estimated 113 million euros.
One of the most spectacular robberies of recent years lasted less than ten minutes. Between 4:55 a.m. and 4:57 a.m., on the morning of November 25, 2019, two men entered the Dresden Residenzschloss through a window. A museum supposedly “as safe as Fort Knox,” as a former director once said. Days before, the perpetrators had broken through the bars in front of the window at night and fixed them provisionally. In order to get into the building unnoticed, they also set fire to a power distribution box near the museum to cut off the power supply to the street lights in front of the museum.
At 4:57 a.m., the surveillance camera images from inside the treasury show two armed perpetrators smashing the safety glass of a display case with an ax and taking away whatever they can get their hands on. Five minutes later they storm back outside. When the police arrived, the perpetrators had already fled.
An “attack on Saxon cultural history,” as Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer later said. The robbers stole around two dozen pieces of jewelry from the jewelry sets of the Saxon Elector Augustus the Strong. Estimated value: around 113 million euros. For art and culture lovers, however, the loss is immeasurable.
Notorious suspects
A good two years later, the trial against the six alleged perpetrators begins on Friday at the Dresden district court. The accused, aged between 22 and 28, belong to the notorious Berlin Remmo family. Their criminal branch is responsible for numerous robberies in recent years. Two of the suspects, Remmo’s cousins Ahmed and Wissam, were sentenced to several years in prison for, among other things, stealing the 100-kilogram gold coin from Berlin’s Bode Museum five years ago.
At that time, the judge Dorothee Prüfer certified the suspects as “audacity and willingness to take risks of a special quality”. If the investigators are correct in the case of the jewel robbery, then the men who broke into the Green Vault were again involved in a spectacular theft – while the gold coin robbery process was still ongoing.
To this day, the Dresden loot has not been found. The perpetrators have probably already torn the valuable stones out of the ensemble and sold them on the black market. However, the special commission “Epaulette”, named after a diamond-studded piece from the looted property, quickly tracked down the suspects. The investigators were also helped by the many parallels to the robbery in the Bode Museum. Shortly after the crime, the police looked to Berlin.
Major raid in Berlin
The getaway car provided the first clues. In order to cover their tracks, the perpetrators torched the car after the burglary in the underground car park of an apartment building. Even the model, an Audi S6, made the investigators sit up and take notice – apparently a car that the Remmos like to drive. In addition, the car had been wrapped before the crime – by a Berlin company whose premises the police later searched. Finally, the DNA traces found on the walls of the Green Vault and in the getaway car matched those of the defendant Wissam Remmo.
1,600 police officers from eight federal states finally arrived in the capital on a November night in 2020. They stormed apartments and searched cafes, garages and Remmo cars. Three young men were arrested, and other suspects were later arrested.
Role of security guards unclear
In the process, the still unresolved questions will certainly come up for discussion. Why did the employees of the private security service raise the alarm so late? Four security guards are said to have followed the robbery on the surveillance camera monitors without intervening. According to the public prosecutor’s office, investigations are still ongoing against her and 40 other suspects. Some house searches have already come to nothing. It is also unclear why the motion scanners were not activated on the day of the crime.
For the trial before the youth chamber of the Dresden district court, appointments are initially scheduled until the end of October. The youth chamber is responsible because two of the accused were adolescents at the time of the crime. On the first day of the trial, no witnesses have yet been summoned; after the indictment has been read out, the accused have the opportunity to comment on the allegations.