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Press conference on "El Maestro": The Bavarian LKA spoke of the largest drug case in its history
Photo: Matthias Balk / dpa
In April of this year I received a message from the SPIEGEL ombudsman.
She receives complaints about our texts and investigates them.
Readers can report anonymously, but the man who complained about my text gave his name.
I wrote about him in 2019.
The police had long claimed he was a big business drug dealer.
The officials named him "El Maestro", based on his profession, because he was a master carpenter.
I researched the case with colleagues for months.
We were able to show that the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office had at most circumstantial evidence for the drug dealer thesis, not hard evidence.
An Italian court had acquitted the man, which only became known through our report in Germany.
However, we also found evidence that the man might be involved in the marijuana trade and wrote down what we knew about it.
Wrong keyword
The carpenter was bothered by one term, among other things.
In the so-called SEO line, which is there to make texts easier to find on search engines like Google, I used the word "drug lord".
Anyone looking for this term found the article even though the man had been acquitted.
I changed the line because it didn't do justice to the text.
And I was a little annoyed with myself.
Because the text criticized the prejudice of the man by the police.
But I made a similar mistake by packing my item incorrectly.