Police on Thursday raided 20 homes and seized dozens of weapons, including a Kalashnikov rifle and assault rifles. They said they had also found foreign currency, gold bars and silver coins to be used to fund a thwarted plan “which was intended to provoke a civil war and eventually overthrow the democratic system in Germany,” the attorney general said in a statement. arrests. Police made the arrests after watching a Telegram chat team called Vereinte Patrioten, which translates to United Patriots. Police also found a stock of fake vaccination certificates and negative COVID tests that would be needed to enter to carry out the plot. Last week, the German lower house of parliament voted against the vaccine mandate for people over the age of 60, after Chancellor Olaf Solz failed to win support. “The two main suspects are believed to have agreed with others to attack the federal health minister,” the Koblenz prosecutor’s office said. He is part of a far-right Reichsbürger group that believes the modern German state is illegal. In a separate incident Wednesday, German prosecutors also charged a young neo-Nazi with links to the US-based Atomwaffen Division for allegedly trying to start a “tribal war” and “founding a terrorist organization” to “maintain the white . Prosecutors say he intended to commit “a serious and dangerous act of violence” against the state and has been in prison since September 2021. The latest threats come after a similar plot was foiled in December when police found shotguns, including crossbows and sharp spikes, in the city of Dresden to be used to kidnap Saxony’s local prime minister, Michael Kretschmer. The group responsible for that attack had about 130 far-right anti-fax supporters. Lauterbach, who said despite the kidnapping plan that he would continue to work, warned that there could be more threats. “This shows that the COVID protests have not just been radicalized,” he told Reuters on Thursday. “But that’s more than just COVID.”
