Prosecutors said earlier Thursday that they had arrested four people suspected of plotting to kidnap the minister and destroy power plants to cause power outages across the country. “This is a small minority in our society, but it is extremely dangerous,” Lauterbach told a news conference. The suspects were linked to groups protesting Covid’s restrictions and the far-right Reichsbürger movement, which denies the existence of the modern German state, the prosecutor’s office in the western city of Koblenz said in a statement. “This shows that the protests against Covid have not just been radicalized, but that it is more than just Covid,” Lauterbach said. The kidnapping conspiracy is the latest in a series of incidents that have highlighted the anger of some Germans over restrictions on those who have not been vaccinated and on proposals to make vaccination mandatory for the general public. In December, police thwarted an anti-vaccination activist plot to assassinate Saxony’s state prime minister in East Germany. Germany’s vaccination campaign is faltering, with about 76.6% of the population taking at least one dose – less than in other Western European countries such as Italy or Spain, where rates are well above 80%. Germany’s lower house last week rejected mandatory vaccinations against Covid for people over 60, in another defeat for Chancellor Olaf Solz, who had already abandoned plans to order vaccines for all adults because he did not could gather a parliamentary majority. The suspects behind the latest conspiracy contacted a group called Vereinte Patrioten, a German for the United Patriots, and “intended to provoke a civil war and eventually overthrow the democratic system in Germany,” the prosecutor’s office said. Authorities searched 20 properties in several German states on Wednesday, seizing weapons such as firearms, ammunition and a Kalashnikov rifle, cash in euros and foreign currency, as well as gold bars and silver coins. They also found fake vaccination certificates and Covid tests, the office said. The office asked a judge to issue arrest warrants for the four detained suspects, all of whom are German nationals. The fifth suspect is free.
