In the early hours of Thursday, March 23, 2023, residents in the German town of Kronberg were woken from their sleep by several explosions.

Criminals had blown up an ATM located below a block of flats in the town center.

The attack caused severe damage to the building and forced the evacuation of its inhabitants. According to local media reports, witnesses saw people dressed in dark clothing fleeing in a black car towards a nearby highway.

During the heist, thieves stole 130,000 euros in cash. They also caused an estimated half a million euros worth of collateral damage, according to a report by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office, BKA.

Rather than staging dramatic and risky bank robberies, criminal groups in Europe have been targeting ATMs as an easier and more low-key target.

In Germany – Europe’s largest economy – thieves have been blowing up ATMs at a rate of more than one per day in recent years. In a country where cash is still a prevalent payment method, the thefts can prove incredibly lucrative, with criminals pocketing hundreds of thousands of euros in one attack.

Europol has been cracking down on the robberies, carrying out large cross-border operations aimed at taking down the highly-organized criminal gangs behind them.

Earlier this month, authorities from Germany, France and the Netherlands arrested three members of a criminal network who have been carrying out attacks on cash machines using explosives, Europol said in a statement.

Since 2022, the detainees are believed to have looted millions of euros and run up a similar amount in property damage, from 2022 to 2024, Europol said.

The criminal network used locations in France as “hideaway spots” and relied on getaway cars hired from a French rental company, according to the statement.

The arrests came as part of a wider operation by German, French and Dutch investigators, which also saw law enforcement search car rental companies whose vehicles had been used to flee crime scenes, in an “action day” across locations in the three countries.

Europol says that perpetrators have mostly been using solid explosives, mainly derived from fireworks, to explode the cash-filled machines – a dangerous tactic that results in heavy damage. In 2023, the lootings in Germany caused 28.4 million euros worth of secondary damage alone, according to BKA.

Often based in the Netherlands, the gangs “take extreme risks and act unscrupulously,” Europol says, both during the robberies themselves and the ensuing escapes in high-powered vehicles.

The chosen ATMs are often in quieter, residential areas – making them easier targets. According to Europol, this means that they pose a serious harm to buildings and residents. The attacks can crumble building facades and scatter shards of glass.

In some cases, they can even prove fatal.

On November 11, an ATM robbery in the town of Wiernsheim in the German state of Baden Württemberg ended in disaster. After stealing 40,000 euros in cash, a criminal trio from the Netherlands attempted a high-speed getaway in a VW Golf with stolen license plates, according to local media reports. Pursued by police, they drove the wrong way down Germany’s A6 motorway.

Two of the three criminals were caught at a rest stop, but the 30-year-old Dutch driver escaped and continued to drive against the traffic at speeds of up to 200 kilometers per hour, until colliding head-on with a van.

The driver and passenger in the truck were both severely injured, with the passenger dying in hospital days later. The driver, who was also heavily injured, was arrested and later sentenced to life in prison.

A rising crime

Germany has become Europe’s prime target for ATM bombings. And with its penchant for cash payments, it’s not hard to see why.

The country has more than 51,000 ATMs. In comparison, the Netherlands has around 5,000. The majority of Germany’s 83.3 million citizens have to travel no further than one kilometer to reach their nearest ATM, according to the central bank, Bundesbank.

Unlike its European neighbors, who largely transitioned away from cash payments due to the Covid-19 pandemic, cash still plays a significant role in Germany. One half of all transactions in 2023 were made using banknotes and coins, according to Bundesbank.

Germans have a cultural attachment to cash, traditionally viewing it as a safe method of payment. Some say it allows a greater level of privacy, and gives them more control over their expenses.

A 2016 study by the Bundesbank found that cash is particularly prevalent among older generations of Germans, meaning lingering memories of the country’s turbulent recent history could play a role in Germany’s reluctance to go digital.

“Neither digitalisation nor the pandemic have been able to oust cash. When it comes to making payments, cash is still by far the most popular means in Germany,” Bundesbank’s Johannes Beermann said in a post-pandemic press release from 2022.

In terms of location, Germany is also an ideal target for cross-border crime: Neighboring the Netherlands and linked by motorways on some of which speed limits don’t apply. 

A decline in ATM machines in the Netherlands and the introduction of enhanced security measures to crack down on the crime – including the installation of glue protection systems that can render bank notes worthless – has also led Dutch criminals to look further afield, according to Reuters, citing Dutch police.

A 2023 BKA report notes that ATM robberies in Germany have been rising since 2005, although they dropped slightly from 2022 to 2023. Still, Germany counted a total of 461 such robberies in 2023 – the second-highest number since surveys began in 2005.

The report also found that, as with previous years, the number of thefts declined during the summer months in 2023 – when longer daylight hours provide a higher risk of being caught. The majority of the crimes took place on working weekdays, between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., according to BKA.

“This extensive network has, in part, drawn organized criminal groups from abroad, seeing the density of ATMs and Germany’s demand for cash access as factors in their favor.”

German banks have invested over 300 million euros into enhanced security to tackle the issue, the spokesperson continued, including “alarm systems, ink staining solutions, reinforced locking mechanisms, and fogging technology.” However, certain techniques such as glueing systems to neutralize stolen cash are not currently permitted in Germany, the spokesperson added.

“These efforts, along with enhanced cooperation with police, have effectively reduced ATM attacks, with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) reporting that 2024 figures are already ‘significantly below last year’s,’” the spokesperson said.

In July, the German government announced that ATM robberies would receive harsher punishment. Thieves must be sentenced to at least two years in prison, when the previous minimum sentence was one year. If the health of an uninvolved person or people is affected, perpetrators must receive prison time ranging from five to fifteen years, up from at least two years previously.

“Anyone who blows up ATMs risks the lives of uninvolved people,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said.

“We are dealing here with unscrupulous perpetrators and highly dangerous explosives. These acts must therefore be punished more severely.”

An Israeli MP behind a bill that would prevent the main UN agency in Gaza and the West Bank from working in Israel has accused the US ambassador in Israel of lobbying opposition leaders to block the move.

If the bill passes in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, this week, it will prohibit any Israeli official from providing services or dealing with employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency and forbid UNRWA from operating in Israel.

Several countries, including the US, have expressed concern over the impact of the bill.

The Israeli government has claimed that some of the UN Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) staff are affiliated with Hamas. UNRWA has strongly denied the allegations, but several governments suspended funding for the agency earlier this year while the allegations were investigated.

She described the US pressure as unacceptable.

But it said that the proposed legislation would make it impossible for UNRWA to operate and would leave a “vacuum that Israel would then be responsible for filling.” A spokesman said UNRWA provided vital services in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Jordan.

UNRWA has long been a target of Israeli criticism and relations between Israel and the UN have slumped amid the war in Gaza.

Last week, the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said the IDF had killed a commander of the Hamas ‘Nukhba’ force who had also been employed by UNRWA since July 2022.

Subsequently, Foreign Minister Israel Katz posted on X that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had “reached new heights of hypocrisy and insensitivity. Last night, he lamented the elimination of their ‘UNRWA colleague’ by IDF forces in Gaza.”

In a letter sent to two senior members of the Israeli government earlier this month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the Biden administration was “deeply concerned” about the potential adoption of the bill.

“UNRWA colluded with Hamas, it is educating kids to hate Israel and spreading antisemitism, it is selling them stories that they will be able to come back to Israel. This will not happen,” Malinovsky said.

UNRWA says it insists on the neutrality of its staff and said the allegations made by Israel about 66 employees out of 30,000 staff amounted to just 0.22% of its payroll.

“There is absolutely no ground for a blanket description of ‘the institution as a whole’ being ‘totally infiltrated,’” the agency said in May.

Former war cabinet member Benny Gantz posted on X last week that UNRWA “chose to make itself an inseparable component of Hamas’ mechanism – and now is the time to detach ourselves entirely from it.”

On Saturday, the foreign ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the UK expressed “grave concern” over the legislation.

They said that without UNRWA’s work, the provision of assistance “including education, health care, and fuel distribution in Gaza and the West Bank would be severely hampered if not impossible.”

In a dramatic show of unity, Georgia’s often fractured opposition gathered at the presidential palace in Tbilisi, standing shoulder to shoulder behind the president, Salome Zourabichvili, as she defiantly announced, “I do not recognize these elections. Recognizing them would be tantamount to legitimizing Russia’s takeover of Georgia … We cannot surrender our European future for the sake of future generations.”

The government, controlled by the ruling Georgian Dream party, she said, is “illegitimate” and the election it carried out October 26 was a “complete falsification.”

Her voice rising, she said: “We were not just witnesses but also victims of what can only be described as a Russian special operation – a new form of hybrid warfare waged against our people and our country.”

She urged Georgians to gather in protest Monday evening on the capital’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, “to peacefully defend every vote and, most importantly, our future.”

The statement was a bold challenge to the Georgian Dream’s founder and now honorary chairman, the reclusive billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who claimed victory in the parliamentary election even before all the votes were counted.

Ivanishvili had vowed to ban the opposition if his party won the election, and his opponents are taking him at his word.

On Saturday, as Georgians cast their ballots, thousands of Georgian and international election observers fanned out to voting precincts across the country, from urban centers to poor, remote villages in the Caucasus mountains, trying to evaluate whether the vote was free and fair.

Throughout election day, video of violations, some of them egregious, like a man boldly jamming ballots into a ballot box, spread quickly.

The day after, at a briefing by the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, the conclusions were troubling: “systematic” intimidation; harassment of voters inside and outside polling stations; “pervasive intimidation and pressure on public sector employees and social-service benefits recipients.”

Observations by the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED) were even more stark: “On election day, ISFED documented serious violations, such as ballot stuffing of ballot papers, multiple voting, unprecedented levels of voter bribery, expulsion of observers from polling stations, as well as instances of mobilizing voters outside polling stations, collecting their personal data, and controlling their voting intentions.”

In Tbilisi, former US Representative John Shimkus said the intimidation and harassment of voters created an “atmosphere of fear.”

Swedish Member of Parliament Margareta Cederfelt added: “The government’s continued harassment and intimidation of voters and civil society not only during the election period, but well before it, has threatened Georgia’s democratic underpinnings.”

The Georgian opposition owes its new unity to the efforts of President Zourabichvili, a person some of them used to criticize, but now respect.

“She is on the right side of history,” said opposition politician Nika Gvaramia. “She is the only one who can unite people.”

Speaking at his Ahali party headquarters, part of the “Coalition 4 Change” just off Tbilisi’s main street, Gvaramia, along with Elene Khoshtaria, founder of the “Droa” party, told reporters: “Russia hacked the (Georgian) election.”

Moscow, they claimed, is carrying out a “hybrid war” with new and different means of technical meddling, and it’s right out of “Putin’s playbook.”

The West, they said, isn’t even playing catch up.

Meanwhile, the Georgian government announced that its first high-level visitor after the election will be Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who plans to spend October 28 and 29 in a high-profile show of support to the Georgian Dream government.

The illiberal leader has found common cause with Georgia’s ruling party and was the first international leader to congratulate them after the election – even before the votes were officially tallied.