Germany updates: Police take on speeders, biker gangs

German climate group DUH, or Environmental Action Germany in English, published its 2025 rankings of senior German politicians' car emissions on Tuesday. 

It found that 63% of the cars it evaluated would exceed the EU target for average CO2 emissions per kilometer driven. That's an improvement on the previous year, but also a relatively modest one. 

The non-profit called the high emissions for politicians' cars "emblematic" of the German car industry's "sluggish" switch toward greener, electric drive. 

Bavarian state premier Markus Söder was singled out for having the most thirsty official vehicle, with his BMW SUV weighing in at more than three times the EU benchmark of 93.6 grams of CO2 per kilometer. 

You can read the full story here. 

German prosecutors have pressed murder charges against the man who drove a car into a Christmas Market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg in December.

Taleb A., a 50-year-old Saudi Arabian doctor described by German authorities as an anti-Islam activist, is accused of six counts of murder and 338 counts of attempted murder.

Five women aged 45 to 75 and one nine-year-old boy were killed in the attack on December 20, 2024, which left over 300 others injured.

Read the full story here.

The computer and video game trade show Gamescom is set to open in the western German city of Cologne on Tuesday with the introduction of the latest installment of the first-person shooter game "Call of Duty."

"Call of Duty: Black Ops 7" will be launched in a small affair with 5,000 attendees — including game makers and fans — at 8 p.m. local time (1800 UTC/GMT).

The fair, staged at Cologne's Koelnmesse convention center, will be open to press and industry guests on Wednesday before general admission starts on Thursday. 

The fair's 1,500 exhibitors expect to host some 370,000 eager fans at the four-day ordeal.

Major producers such as Nintendo and Microsoft will be on hand alongside developers, yet PlayStation maker Sony has elected to stay away from the event.  

Industry analysts expect the $190 billion (€163 billion) industry to remain steady in terms of revenue in 2025 despite a longer period of difficulty.

Game Industry Layoffs, an online tracking website, has registered 30,000 job cuts since early 2023, with more than 4,000 coming this year alone.

German farmers, faced with more frequent and intense bouts of heat and drought, have begun to increase soybean production.

Germany's Federal Statistical Office on Tuesday said soybean cultivation expanded nearly 157% between 2016 and 2024 — from roughly 15,800 hectares planted at 2,400 farms, to nearly 40,500 hectares at 4,500 farms in 2024.

Despite the jump, wheat still rules Germany's farm fields, covering 2.6 million hectares of countryside. 

Although German farmers increased the amount of irrigable land they now farm by nearly a quarter between 2009 and 2022 — up to 791,800 hectares — that only represents 4.8% of overall farmland. Hence, the move to soybeans, which are considered drought resistant and can be processed into a number of foods for human and animal consumption. 

German courts on Tuesday continued the trials of anti-government terror suspects from the far-right and far-left of the political spectrum.

Reichsbürger trial in Frankfurt

In Frankfurt, nine individuals with ties to the so-called Reichsbürger movement are on trial, accused of membership in, or the support of, a terrorist organization with the intention of overthrowing the government in order to replace it with one of their own.

The individuals have ties a group centered around Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, a far-right  monarchy advocate who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

RAF trial hears testimony of armored car robbery

Also in the state of Hesse, the trial of Daniela Klette, a former member of the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist group, continued as witnesses described a 2016 attack on an armored bank vehicle near the city of Braunschweig.

Klette was a member of the outfit before it disbanded in 1998. Although the group was dissolved and stopped politically motivated attacks, individual members continued decades-long crime sprees — mainly robberies — thought to have been carried out as a way to finance an underground existence.

Witnesses were asked on Tuesday about the situation surrounding a June 25, 2016, rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack on an armored vehicle in the city of Cremlingen. State prosecutors say Klette and her accomplices made off with roughly €1.4 million ($1.65 million) in the heist.

Klette stands accused of attempted murder and 13 counts of armed robbery.  

Police in Germany carried out large-scale raids in three states on Tuesday in an effort to gather evidence of criminal behavior by regional motorcycle gangs.
 
Raids were carried out in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia as well as the southern state of Bavaria.

The Thuringia State Criminal Police Office said the raids, which targeted residential and commercial properties as well as storage facilities, were designed to find evidence supporting charges of extortion.

Thuringia's state Interior Ministry says the southern part of the state has become a hotbed of biker activity, though statistics show that it is responsible for a small number of biker-related crimes carried out nationally. 

Though officials say the groups are not considered a larger security threat, they remain vigilant to crimes committed by individuals associated with them, noting that gangs and members are very active on social media, organizing larger events.  

Police in the western German state of Hesse arrested a speeder on the A67 autobahn late Monday night after motorists alerted them to an Audi Q7 SUV with foreign plates being driven dangerously along the stretch of the freeway.

Police caught up with the northbound vehicle thanks to a motorist who maintained contact with them while following the Audi, which was reportedly swerving across the road at speeds of between 70 kph and 220 kph (43 mph and 137 mph).

Police were able to stop the vehicle at a rest area near Weiterstadt, where they deduced that both the driver and passenger were under the influence of alcohol.

When police administered breathalyzer tests, the driver blew 4.16 g/L and his passenger knocked out the device, which does not measure beyond blood-alcohol content beyond a level of 5 g/L, which is equal to 5 grams of alcohol per liter of blood. 

Police issued blood tests, then revoked the driver's license before taking him into custody.

Police say it is sheer luck that no one was seriously injured in the incident.

Driving with a BAC of 0.5 g/L or higher is prohibited in Germany and driving with BAC levels above 1.1 g/L is a criminal offense. 

BAC levels of 4 g/L and higher are classified as acutely life-threatening, potentially triggering coma or fatal respiratory arrest as the result of alcohol poisoning.  

Guten Tag from the Bonn online news team, and welcome to our coverage of Germany this Tuesday.

Today, we are reporting on German police chasing down dangerous speeders and raiding the clubhouses of biker gangs.

Prosecutors are busy, too, with courts seeking to hold accused terrorists from both the far-left and far-right to account.