'Kurdish-Lebanese clans increasingly powerful in German underworld'
August 6, 2024

Criminal Kurdish-Lebanese clans are increasingly fighting their differences in public life in Germany and are spreading fear among the population. In Berlin, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bremen and Lower Saxony, Arab criminal clans are fighting bloody feuds for money, power and honour.

FOCUS Online writes that in May a massive brawl took place on the sidelines of the football match in Essen between Al-Arz Lebanon and RuWa Dellwig. About 60 men chased each other with knives and machetes among other visitors. A shot was also fired. A large police force managed to prevent worse.

Saado clan
In the background, a financial dispute is said to be taking place between two rival family branches of the Kurdish-Lebanese Saado clan. A little over a week later, there is a serious brawl between 40 men in Essen-Altendorf. This time, it was about the allegedly tarnished honor of a young woman. The men attacked each other with furniture, knives and machetes.

Bloody feuds
The two battles are anything but isolated incidents. Bloody feuds over money, power and honour are almost daily occurrences among the various clans in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Berlin, Bremen and Lower Saxony, such family clans have long been regular customers of German prosecutors.
Undercover agents have no chance of infiltrating the closed family structures. And in the event of arrests, the omerta (duty of silence) applies.

FOCUS Online writes that criminal families play a major role in the German underworld and are constantly expanding their influence. The arm of the big clans now reaches into Scandinavia, France, Turkey and the Benelux.

Berlin underworld
In the clan hotspot Berlin, things are sometimes even more brutal than in North Rhine-Westphalia. A report from the Berlin State Criminal Police (LKA) from August 2023 on the crimes of large Arab families states that the influence of Arab gangsters in the Berlin underworld is increasing. According to the study, one in five cases of organized crime takes place in the clan environment.

The family clans in Berlin are involved in shootings, murders, armed robberies of cash-in-transit vehicles, spectacular burglaries, knife attacks, drug trafficking, prostitution, fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, illegal gambling and welfare fraud.

Legal facade
According to the Berlin police, family syndicates have contacts in the biker, bouncer, rap and martial arts circles. The family syndicates have long tried to give their illegal businesses a legal front by operating shisha bars, jewelry stores, construction companies and car rental companies. Criminal profits are sometimes laundered in Lebanon or Turkey.

German nationality
Many criminal clan members have German passports. The LKA holds three clan members with German nationality responsible for the burglary of a safe on Fasanenstraße in Charlottenburg in November 2022. The perpetrators stole almost 50 million euros.

Many criminal members of the notorious Remmo clan have German passports. Among them were the men who stole 113 million euros worth of jewelry from the Green Vault in Dresden.

Omeirat clan
At the top of the 116 large families in the national crime rankings, the Omeirat clan still stands. Almost every tenth crime is committed by the criminal offshoots of the large clan. Politicians are currently discussing controversial measures against the influence of Kurdish-Lebanese family clans.

Miri clan
The Miri network is one of the most important players in the local clan world. In their main area of ??influence Bremen and Lower Saxony alone, the researchers count around 30 families with a total of 2600 members, nationwide there would be 8000 members.

Miri's offshoots have long since expanded their operations beyond Bremen to Bochum, Herne, Dortmund and Essen, as well as to eastern German regions such as Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. However, it is not clear how many family members are actually criminals.

Dortmund drug lord
On Saturday, Dortmund drug lord Esmat E., alias “Sammy Miri” (38) was extradited from Turkey to Germany after being on the run for three years . In 2021, an arrest warrant was issued for Miri for cocaine trafficking. He then fled to Spain and then to Turkey. In March of this year, Miri was arrested by the Turkish authorities and now faces up to 15 years in prison in Germany.

EncroChat
According to German authorities, Sammy Miri and his accomplices are said to have operated a cocaine network that was dismantled in 2020 by intercepting chat messages from the hacked messaging service EncroChat.

https://www.crimesite.nl/koerdisch-libanese-clans-steeds-machtiger-in-duitse-onderwereld/