Two suspected leaders of an Eritrean opposition group classified by German prosecutors as a domestic terrorist organisation have been arrested and remanded in custody after investigators said members treated violence against German police as a legitimate tactic.
Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office said on September 15 that an Eritrean national (Merhawi A.) and a German national (Shimangus T.) were detained near Saarbrücken and in Stuttgart.
They face accusations of membership of a terrorist organisation. An investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe issued arrest warrants and both men were placed in pre-trial detention.
Prosecutors identified the pair as central figures in building the German structures of Brigade N’Hamedu Deutschland and in organising violent actions. The Eritrean national had served for a time as secretary-general; the German national was the group’s first chairman.
According to the Karlsruhe office, the internationally networked group’s declared aim is the overthrow of the government in Eritrea.
In Germany it pursued that objective through violence at events staged by supporters of the Eritrean authorities.
“In doing so, the members of the organisation regarded violence against German state institutions and representatives of state authority, including police officers deployed to protect the events, as a legitimate means,” prosecutors said.
The allegations centre on riots at Eritrean festivals in Giessen in August 2022 and August 2023, and at a seminar of an Eritrean association in Stuttgart in September 2023.
Numerous police officers were injured in those clashes, some of them seriously. Dozens of people were detained at the time.
The latest arrests follow nationwide searches in March 2025. More than 200 officers searched 19 properties in Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Rhineland-Palatinate, with a further raid in Denmark.
Seventeen named suspects were then under investigation for founding or belonging to the German branch of the group; no arrests were made that day.
Eritrea, a Horn of Africa state of about four million people, has long been described by human-rights organisations as one of the world’s most repressive countries, marked by systematic restrictions on basic freedoms.
Rival factions within its diaspora have repeatedly clashed in European cities, including violent scenes in the Netherlands as well as Germany. Prosecutors have treated the German branch of Brigade N’Hamedu as a terrorist organisation since at least those 2022–23 incidents.
A group of Eritrean people-smugglers were involved in widespread human trafficking and committed violent atrocities against migrants, a report by the Dutch National Rapporteur on Human Trafficking has said. https://t.co/wnsr4P5EQF
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) January 24, 2025
