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Flooded street in the municipality of Swisttal in North Rhine-Westphalia: construction machinery, jewelry and notebooks stolen
Photo: Marius Becker / picture alliance / dpa
During and after the flood disaster, 1,057 criminal offenses were registered in North Rhine-Westphalia.
This emerges from an answer to a major inquiry from the AfD parliamentary group in North Rhine-Westphalia.
According to the Ministry of Justice, the "confusing overall situation" created "obvious opportunities" in the affected areas, which suspects primarily took advantage of in the "acute phase" of the flood.
The report is available to SPIEGEL, previously the "Kölner Stadtanzeiger" had reported.
The crimes were therefore registered between July 14 and December 31, 2021.
Only those that occurred in the affected areas and in which there was a connection to the flood disaster were taken into account.
The document shows that crime was recorded especially in the first month after the flood, after which the number drops sharply.
The report counts 632 property crimes alone.
The suspects entered freely accessible or insufficiently secured apartments and houses.
In individual cases, "high-value items" such as construction machinery, notebooks or jewelry were stolen from locked rooms that were temporarily unoccupied.
The alleged perpetrators would have levered open windows or broken doors.
The report also records embezzlement, robberies, looting of shop windows and dozens of burglaries.
According to the report, 275 suspects were identified in the property crimes.
These cases included arson, assault, subsidy and benefit fraud, embezzlement and environmental crimes.
The criminal justice system has filed 54 charges so far.
56 penal orders and 48 convictions were issued.
806 proceedings were discontinued.
670 people were affected by the criminal acts, as well as hundreds of companies and institutions.
The ministry emphasizes that the crimes "are not the result of organized crime or gang structures".
Rather, it is a matter of individual perpetrators and “organized majorities of people”.
Northern Rhineland-Palatinate was hit particularly hard by the flood disaster in July 2021. 134 people died in the Ahr Valley alone.
49 people died in North Rhine-Westphalia (read more about the consequences of the flood here).
tgk/jpz/dpa
