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The Unsolved Bombing - S-Bahnhof Wehrhahn
On a summer afternoon in July 2000, a pipe bomb hidden in a plastic bag exploded beside a group of language-school students on this pedestrian ramp, injuring ten people. More than two decades later, the Wehrhahn bombing remains officially unsolved.
À propos de ce lieu
The Ackerstraße entrance to S-Bahnhof Wehrhahn looks like any other suburban station ramp: a concrete slope, tram lines overhead, commuters moving in and out without a second glance. But on 27 July 2000, shortly after three in the afternoon, a pipe bomb packed with TNT concealed in an ordinary plastic bag exploded right here beside a group of students from a nearby language school. Ten people were seriously injured, most of them immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, six of them members of Jewish communities, all newcomers simply trying to build new lives in Germany. A woman five months pregnant lost her unborn child. A 70-officer task force pursued far-right, organised crime and Islamist leads for nearly a decade before the case was suspended in 2009. In 2017 a suspect was arrested and tried, but acquitted in July 2018 when the court found the evidence insufficient. The Federal Court of Justice confirmed that acquittal in January 2021. The bombing remains the largest unsolved attack on German soil in the post-reunification era.
À retenir
- 10 people injured — Ten bystanders were injured when shrapnel tore through the group of language-school students on the pedestrian ramp, including a pregnant woman who lost her unborn child.
- 100 metres — The TNT-packed pipe bomb was powerful enough to scatter shrapnel up to a hundred metres in every direction when it detonated on the afternoon of 27 July 2000.
- 70 officers — A dedicated task force of seventy officers spent nearly a decade pursuing leads connected to far-right extremists, organised crime and Islamist networks before the investigation was formally suspended in 2009.