Unknown perpetrators have set fire to dozens of delivery vans in two coordinated attacks in Berlin in the morning of June 17.
In the early hours of June 17, 18 vehicles belonging to internet commerce giant Amazon were completely destroyed, according to Berlin police.
Five more were damaged by the flames. Another 17 vans were set alight on a parking lot belonging to German telecoms company Deutsche Telekom.
According to local newspaper Berliner Zeitung, the firefighters were alerted to both incidents at 3 am on June 17. It took the fire brigade around an hour to extinguish the blazes.
The Amazon vans were torched on a site on Koppelweg in Neukölln in the south of the German capital. The Telekom parking was situated in Lichtenberg in Berlin’s east.
The police said they believed left-wing extremists were behind both arson attacks. The State Security Department at the Berlin Office of Criminal Investigations has launched an investigation.
Thorsten Schleheider, deputy leader of the policemen’s union in Berlin, told Berliner Zeitung: “Last night’s arson attacks seamlessly join the ranks of the ever-growing number of nonsense offences against such companies.
“For sure, later today an ideologically inflated doomsday pamphlet will appear on a well-known platform, in which everything from global warming and the morning newsfeed from Burundi to the involvement of Freemasons, Illuminati and Armenians is thrown together to cobble together a legitimisation basis for these senseless acts.
“At the end of the day, these are and remain serious criminal offences that cannot be justified by anything and will not even begin to change the structures of the companies concerned,” Schleheider concluded.
At noon on June 17, a letter of confession was posted on the left-wing website Indymedia.
The anonymous letter referred to the arson attacks as an “anti-militarist attack on military collaborators Amazon and Telekom”, accusing both companies of “profiting immensely from global militarisation and extending wars”.
The authors mentioned that Amazon’s cloud services were used by the Israeli army and that Deutsche Telekom was educating German soldiers on IT matters.
The letter concluded with a testimonial to Kyriakos Ximitri, a Greek left-wing extremist who died in 2024 when a home-made bomb he was manufacturing exploded prematurely.
The Berlin arson attacks may have been triggered by the opening of Amazon’s new headquarters in the German capital on June 16.
The group’s new building, the 140-metre-high East Side Tower, will house 2,500 office workers who were working in different offices all over the city.
Berlin has a long history of such arson. Between 2008 and 2017 more than 100 attacks on vehicles were committed every year.
In 2020 and 2021 more than 400 cars were set alight. In 2021, the total number of cars, including those that caught fire when vehicles in the vicinity were torched, surpassed 700.
