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Screenshot of the Paraguayan news site ABC Colour: Wanted poster shows the four people they are looking for
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Screenshot / abc.com/py
On the morning of November 27, 2021, an Air Europa scheduled flight from Madrid will land in Asunción, Paraguay.
There are four people on board who could be taken for a classic blended family: father, mother and two girls of about the same age with different last names: Lara Blank and Clara Egler.
What was unknown in Paraguay at the time: The adults, Andreas Egler and his new wife Anna, are opposed to vaccination and are fleeing the corona measures.
They secretly take their daughters from previous relationships with them - and thus snatch their children away from the parents who stayed in Germany.
Germany, as Andreas Egler and his partner wrote in a farewell letter, is on the verge of collapse and is a "surveillance state" in which "human experiments" are threatening.
Therefore, they would have to pull the »rip cord«.
When the four disappeared in South America, the parents who stayed in Germany began a desperate search that has not yet ended.
The Eglers are still in hiding with the children.
DER SPIEGEL had reported on the case.
Since this weekend, a good six months after the children's disappearance, this search has been a topic in Paraguay: On Saturday, the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color published wanted posters of the four wanted people.
The newspaper writes that they tried to settle in an “anti-vaccine enclave” in La Colmena.
The pandemic has made Paraguay a dream destination for German-speaking lateral thinkers and opponents of the Corona measures.
According to the newspaper, these are “extremist communities”.
The Eglers lived in this environment until the end of January, after which all traces are lost.
Investigators from an anti-kidnapping unit have not been able to get any further in the case either.
A Paraguayan investigator told SPIEGEL: "The community of German immigrants is scattered across the country - and completely closed to us.
They only come when they have a problem, they don't want to help us."
Filip Blank is the father of one of the missing girls, and he too has been looking for the children in Paraguay for five weeks.
He says his ex-wife's entire family is helping him find him.
For him, the mother of their daughter is “in a tunnel of fears”.
Filip Blank now fears that the Egler couple will "make even more irrational decisions than before" with the public manhunt that has now started in Paraguay.
"Get back together as a family"
He has been writing emails to his ex-wife for months.
He doesn't know whether they will go down well or be read.
At the end of last week he published a video on Facebook in which he addressed his ex-wife directly.
If she doesn't currently know what a way back home could look like, he asks her to contact the embassy or his lawyer Ingo Bott.
In the almost five-minute video, he goes on to say that what happened "is a crime.
But here, too, I will do my best to ensure that we finally get back together as a family.«
There is already a judgment from a comparable case, it is only a few weeks old.
Here, too, a mother and her new partner had disappeared to Paraguay in the summer of 2021 because of the German pandemic measures and had taken away their two children from their biological father.
Before that, their main focus of life was with their father, and they, too, suddenly disappeared.
The man did some research, flew after his children, found them in South America after several weeks and brought them back to Germany after a good three months.
The children's mother was sentenced to one and a half years probation and has to do an additional 200 hours of community service.
The verdict could have been harsher, they say.
But the father had campaigned in court to ensure that the mother of his children did not have to go to prison.
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