Germany aborts anti-vaccine plan to kill Saxon prime minister

Federal state police Saxony arrested early this Wednesday six people in the framework of an operation against a group of people who allegedly planned murder to the regional prime minister, the Christian Democrat Michael Kretschmer. Both a police spokesman and the Regional Office of Criminal Investigation confirmed the seizure of several weapons, including crossbows and firearms, in the six buildings registered in different parts of Saxony. The police are now analyzing the weapons.

According to the prosecution’s version, the six people arrested – five men and one woman – had participated in a Telegram messaging app group in which they openly expressed their intention to attack the Saxon Prime Minister. The police operation, in which agents of the Special Forces common in anti-terrorist raids, is the reaction to a report of the ‘Frontal’ research program, from the public television network ZDF.

On December 7, ‘Frontal’ published a report in which it explained how its reporters had managed to infiltrate a private Telegram group with a false identity. In that group, in which some 100 deniers of the coronavirus and radically opposed to the restrictions of public life, some participants sent voice messages that said things like these: “It is time to eliminate the prime minister”, “we would have to go and get the guy, take him out and hang him somewhere And continue like this with the next and with the next “,” I hope to find a couple of patriots who are prepared to act with armed violence against those retards who want to repress us. ” The hardest nucleus came to organize several face-to-face meetings in a Saxon forest, as ‘Frontal’ reporters documented.

Denier bastion

The Saxon Interior Minister, the also Christian Democrat Roland Wöller, considers it proven that the detainees are part of the far right circles region of. Saxony, in southeastern Germany, is a state with strong structures ultra-rightists and neo-Nazis. With the onset of the pandemic and the introduction of restrictions on public life, these ultra structures have merged with deniers, anti-vaccines and other profiles of the heterogeneous German anti-coronavirus movement. The German secret services already warned months ago of the danger of radicalization of this phenomenon of protest that is difficult to classify.

In recent weeks they have been produced all over Germany rallies and protests by advocates of conspiracy theories and detractors of the Government’s anticovid measures, often marked by incidents with the police and attacks on the press. Last week, a group of 30 people gathered with torches outside the private residence of the Saxon health official, Petra Köpping, in an incident that was harshly condemned by all parties on the parliamentary spectrum.

Scholz Warning

Related news

“We will oppose with all the means of our democratic state of law,” said this Wednesday the new federal chancellor, the social democrat Olaf Scholz, referring to the most radicalized fractions of the anti-vaccine and denialist movement during his first statement as head of Government before the Bundestag. Scholz insisted on the need to combat the pandemic and denied that the measures that the authorities are applying to stop the rise in infections are polarizing society, as denounced by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Saxony is the German federal state with a lower population share with the full vaccination schedule against covid-19. According to data from the Robert Koch Institute, less than 60% of the elderly population is fully vaccinated. The rate of incidence At the same time, it is one of the highest in the country: some regions of Saxony register more than 2,500 new cases for every 100,000 inhabitants accumulated within a week. The layers of the population that continue to resist being vaccinated are, however, very important despite the restrictive measures of access to public spaces aimed only at the non-immunized population.