EnglishIn April 2022,[1] October 2022,[2] and February 2025[3] several raids took place as part of an investigation into the editors of the German anarchist newspaper Zündlumpen, published from 2019 to 2021.
In April 2022 a raid on a print shop took place in which police seized thousands of books, zines, and newspapers, as well as all printing equipment and materials, apparently in an attempt to disrupt the printing capacity of local anarchists.
In February 2025, two people suspected of being editors of Zündlumpen were arrested.[4] They are currently imprisoned pending trial.
Techniques used
| Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Detection dogs | In some of the February 2025 raids, police used detection dogs to locate electronic devices.[3] | |
| Forensics | ||
| DNA | DNA traces were collected from a cigarette butt[5], zines,[4] books, doors, cups, and printing machines. | |
| Linguistics | Investigators compared texts from the newspaper Zündlumpen with private letters found in house raids, hoping to prove that people had written in the newspaper.[4] | |
| Physical surveillance | ||
| Covert | Investigators followed a person for 15 days.[4] | |
| Police patrols | Investigators sent a police patrol outside a person's apartment every night at irregular times to check if she was at her apartment.[4] | |
| Service provider collaboration | ||
| Other | Investigators used the collaboration of banks to:[4]
Investigators asked several companies to provide information about a person:
| |
| Targeted digital surveillance | ||
| Authentication bypass | In some of the April 2022 raids, police seized smartphones immediately after entering and plugged them into power banks, presumably to prevent them from shutting down and reverting to an encrypted state.[1] | |
| IMSI-catcher | Investigators used an IMSI-catcher to identify the phone number of a person's mother. They used it both at the mother's home and at her workplace: the correlation of the two uses allowed them to identify the phone number.[4] | |