Organised criminals are benefiting from the wave of Islamic extremists in Germany because the threat of terror attacks take up so much police resources, leaving criminals with a free hand.
Many Germans may not respond well to the news that Islamic radicalism and terror attacks are on the rise, but a certain segment of society may be able to find succour in the shift in Germany society. Organised criminals, outlaw bikers, and drug dealers are welcoming the wave of Islamic extremists flowing into Germany as the more they grow, the more police resources they consume.
The result is that the criminal gangs can act with virtual impunity as law enforcement can’t keep up, reports Die Welt.
The Mobile Einsatzkommandos (MEK) are an elite group of German law enforcement, the equivalent of the U.S. SWAT teams or the British Flying Squad (CO19), and are used to dealing with organised crime. Now, in cities like Berlin and Bremen, they have noticed they are spending far more of their resources on combating Muslim extremists and terrorism, leaving a gap in their ability to fight organised gangs.
In the German capital of Berlin, the MEK has said there are currently 74 radical Islamists under investigation and that number is rising rapidly with ten added in the last six months alone. The numbers correlate with investigations by European law enforcement who were shocked at the scale of the Islamic State terror network across the continent earlier this year.
A Berlin MEK official was frank about the matter saying that the group’s ability to act has been severely limited. Anyone “who says otherwise is lying — plain and simple” he said, adding that “in the red light and drug scene, the gangsters are rubbing their hands because they feel, naturally, that the pressure on them has eased off.”
Norbert Cioma, who heads the State Criminal Investigation Department, said the resources are so heavily used for Islamists but yield little results. “We know what the suspects eat, where they buy their daily newspaper. We see them go four times in a day to the mosque, but we have no idea what they do there and with whom they share what messages.”
“Technically, we still find ourselves in the Stone Age, while organised terrorists communicate together via highly encrypted media. We can’t even monitor DSL [technology used to transmit data across telephone lines],” he said.
Islamic radicalism, Salafist preachers, and the number of terrorist attacks in Germany have all substantially risen over the course of the migrant crisis in the past year. Terror attacks are thwarted or attempted on an almost weekly basis. A Syrian migrant who was caught Monday afternoon in Leipzig after he was planning to commit a bombing in the city of Chemnitz last week.
Some in the German Federal government, like Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, have admitted that Germans must expect future terror attacks by “lone wolves” and organised groups like those that committed the Paris and Brussels attacks.