German authorities have launched nationwide raids against members of the environmental activist group Last Generation. The Munich State Prosecutor's Office announced that 15 properties across seven German states were searched on Wednesday, conducted by the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office and the Munich General Public Prosecutor's Office.
The Prosecutor General's Office in Munich began a criminal investigation into seven defendants, aged between 22 and 38 years, for forming or supporting a criminal organization. The investigation began in response to numerous criminal complaints received from the public since mid-2022.
The defendants are accused of organizing a fundraising campaign to finance "further crimes" for Last Generation. They advertised the fundraising effort on their website and collected at least 1.4 million Euros in donations. Two of the defendants are also suspected of attempting to sabotage the Trieste-Ingolstadt oil pipeline in April 2022, according to the LKA.
Despite the allegations, the environmental group has stated that their protests are exclusively non-violent. Last Generation has been blocking roads and targeting art works across Germany for nearly a year. They have used tactics such as gluing themselves to streets to draw attention to their cause.
The raids took place in several cities, with four searches in Berlin, three in Bavaria, and three in Hesse. There were also operations in Hamburg, Magdeburg, Dresden, and Schleswig-Holstein. The authorities have not yet released any further details on the outcome of the searches.
The investigation and subsequent raids are a part of a larger effort by German authorities to tackle environmental activism. In recent months, German security services have been monitoring an increasing number of environmental groups that they believe could pose a threat to national infrastructure. The German government has taken a firm stance on climate change and has implemented a policy of reducing the country's carbon emissions to zero by 2045.