Thursday, December 02, 2021
More open arrest warrants
Hundreds of extremists are at large
Although there is an arrest warrant against them, many extremists in Germany are not in prison. Most of them are right-wing offenders. Their number has increased noticeably in the last six months.
The number of unexecuted arrest warrants against extremists has recently increased slightly in Germany. As can be seen from a response by the federal government to a small request from the AfD parliamentary group, there were 788 open arrest warrants nationwide against politically motivated criminals from the right-wing spectrum at the end of September. Six months earlier, 602 open arrest warrants against rights had been stored in the police’s databases.
The number of unexecuted arrest warrants against left-wing politically motivated criminals rose from 95 to 128 arrest warrants over the same period. However, there had previously been a decline. As a government response to an older question from the Greens parliamentary group shows, there were still 151 arrest warrants against left-wing offenders as of March 26, 2020. In the meantime, the numbers for the areas of Islamism and “foreign ideology” as well as for politically motivated criminals who could not be assigned to any specific spectrum had risen.
International manhunt for thousands of Islamists
Of the more than 6,500 arrest warrants against suspected Islamists that were stored in the systems of the German security authorities at the end of September, however, there were 6,060 search requests from foreign authorities. For most of them, according to the federal government, there is no evidence that the wanted person is staying in Germany.
If, on the other hand, one only looks at the open arrest warrants placed by German authorities against people from the spectrum of “religious ideology”, their number fell: while on March 31, 2021 there were still 715 open arrest warrants from German authorities in this phenomenon, their number was on the cut-off date September 30th out of 523 unfulfilled arrest warrants.
In its reply, the Federal Ministry of the Interior points out that the enforcement of open arrest warrants is the responsibility of the police authorities of the federal states and that the Federal Criminal Police Office only provides support. It should also be taken into account that the offense on which the arrest warrant is based does not necessarily have to be a politically motivated crime. For example, an arrest warrant against a right-wing offender that was entered into the police information system last August is reported to be a drug offense.