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Raids against Hells Angels – messages deciphered

Google translated from German


Police officers in front of a building in an industrial park in Berlin-Weißensee. Since the early morning, action has been taken against the Hells Angels in Berlin and Brandenburg. Photo: Paul Zinken / dpa

Berlin / Potsdam (dpa) – The decryption of the crypto messenger service Encrochat has already exposed a number of criminal organizations – now the Hells Angels have also been hit.

On Thursday, the police in Berlin and Brandenburg struck with two major raids against the rocker milieu. Seven suspicious members of the Hells Angels were arrested, the police searched a total of 24 apartments and other rooms, as the police in Potsdam and the Berlin public prosecutor announced.

It was about organized rocker crime and drug and weapon trafficking, it said. In Berlin alone, 230 police officers had been on duty since early Thursday morning and searched 18 locations.

After bloody competitive battles a few years ago, it was recently a little quieter in public about the Hells Angels. The intercepted and decrypted messages from the short message service Encrochat gave the police the opportunity to obtain information from the otherwise isolated rocker milieu.

The Encrochat company offered complex encryption for cell phones, which was mainly used by criminals. 60,000 participants used the chat service because it was said that the technology could not be cracked. The police in the Netherlands and France managed it anyway. Chats and conversations from April to June 2020 were deciphered. It was about 20 million messages.

“Encrochat is an absolute gold mine for the security authorities because criminals have been communicating openly about criminal offenses here for years,” said the Berlin Police Union. “The sheer mass of knowledge is both a curse and a blessing, because it ties up the Kripo’s great capacities for years.”