The German police took a large-scale action against members of a chat group on Wednesday. The Koblenz public prosecutor’s office and the Rhineland-Palatinate police announced this on Thursday.

 

The “United Patriots” group members are said to have planned attacks and kidnappings of famous persons. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach would have been a target, among others.

On Wednesday, house searches took place in twenty places in Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia. About 270 officers took part.

In total, an investigation would have been opened into twelve people. Five of them are accused of planning an attack and of having violated gun laws. Four people were arrested.

These persons are said to be part of the anti-corona movement and part of the ‘Reichsbürgerbewegung’, which does not recognize the legitimacy of the modern German state. Weapons, ammunition, cash, gold bars and silver coins were seized during the searches.

The chat group members allegedly planned to destroy electricity supplies to cause a national power outage. “In this way, the accused wanted to provoke a kind of civil war, after which the democratic system in Germany would be overthrown,” it said in a statement from the office of the Attorney General of Rhineland-Palatinate. The investigation against the group had been going on since October.