The açai café, which only opened on Frankfurter Street in the summer, was popular. At least that's what residents report. There were long queues. However, it is unclear who owns the business. The name Max Mustermann appears in the imprint. Now, on this Thursday morning, there isn't much left of Café Rio: the door is hanging askew on its hinges, its glass is broken, as is that of the skylights. The shards are scattered far across Berger Strasse. The shop window is blind from all the cracks, but it's still hanging there.
The café is now the fifth property where an attack has been carried out in the past few days. In total, there were around two dozen explosions in the Rhine-Main area around Frankfurt. The Hessian State Criminal Police Office speaks of “acts in the double-digit range” that are currently being examined to determine whether they can be attributed to the phenomenon of “violence as a service”.
A 17-year-old Dutch man has been arrested
This means that mostly young perpetrators are recruited by people behind them and paid to set incendiary devices or commit other crimes. The motives almost always lead to organized crime. The acts are “punitive actions”, for example when transactions in the international drug trade did not go as they should. Just a few days ago, Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) also addressed the phenomenon. When presenting the situation report on organized crime, he spoke of “criminal services” and said that they functioned according to one and the same principle: “One person plans, one pays, one strikes”.
That's probably how it was in Frankfurt too. At least that is what investigators are currently examining. Almost at the same time as the incendiary device exploded at Café Rio, the açai bar, another explosive device was detonated. This time on the Zeil, one of the largest shopping streets in Germany. At the “Truth Lounge” shisha bar near the Bürgeramt. According to information from the F.A.Z. Investigators arrested a suspect shortly after the attack on Berger Strasse. It is a 17 year old Dutch man.
That doesn't surprise the investigators either. The fact that the perpetrators recruited come from the Netherlands is, so to speak, part of the phenomenon. Similar to the ATM blasts. Hesse is also not the first and only federal state to be affected by this type of crime. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the investigative authorities have been dealing with this for years.
Actions are classified as “violence as a service” phenomenon
But what are the reasons behind these acts? Only on Sunday there were attacks on a shisha bar in Offenbach and on a kiosk in the Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt. Finally, on Monday, an explosive device exploded in front of a residential building in Bockenheim. Five acts, five people affected. But where is the connection? A police spokesman says there are initial indications that there are links to organized crime. The details are currently being determined. The focus is on the question of who owns the shops and the apartments in the affected residential building. The series of attacks can clearly be attributed to the phenomenon of “violence as a service”.
The Organized Crime Commissariat at Frankfurt Police Headquarters has now taken the lead in the investigation. The authority has drawn up an extensive search and control concept.
The impact of the explosions has already been demonstrated several times by the objects affected. And the violence is also clear on Berger Strasse. The entire shop window of the soup restaurant opposite fell onto the street and its door also shattered. A taxi that was parked on the side of the road between the two shops had its license plate and fuel cap blown off. Plaster fell from the entrance to the house next door. According to police, the bomb attack shocked many residents awake. Even in the surrounding streets. Several people reported that there were two loud bangs. A man says that afterwards a large cloud of smoke drifted down the street.
The crime scene is located directly at the southern exit to the Merianplatz subway station, and passers-by are still allowed in there the next morning. The street itself is completely blocked off beyond the next intersection, and traffic is backed up all the way up to Höhenstraße. Horns are honked every now and then, and some people try to make daring U-turn maneuvers to avoid the side streets. At the police cordon in front of Café Rio, the rush seems to have evaporated: neighbors and passers-by stand there for a long time, watching the police officers, who first capture the scene with a special camera and then go into the devastated shop with white plastic protectors on their feet. In more and more places they are putting up the familiar yellow signs in front of them that mark possible evidence.
Many of those standing around have heard about the series of attacks in which, miraculously, no one was injured. A teenager was also arrested after the arson attack at the weekend. He is just 15 years old.
“Violence as a service” is no longer a fringe phenomenon, says Dirk Peglow, chairman of the Association of German Criminal Investigators. “We are increasingly seeing that violence within criminal structures is being outsourced and literally purchased as a service.” It is particularly problematic that very young perpetrators are often used who have no personal contact with the actual clients and therefore cannot provide any information about the possible background of the commissioned crimes.
The Hessian Interior Minister Roman Poseck (CDU) said: “Violence must not become a business model.” He refers to a task force in the Hessian LKA that has created a "powerful structure" that "doesn't stop at the interchangeable perpetrators at the bottom of the chain, but rather specifically targets the people behind it, recruiters and logisticians. That's exactly where the investigators start because that's where the real threat lies."
After all, the perpetrators struck at times when the risk of injuring people was low, says a man who also looked at the destruction at the Rio Café. He is only partially right: Café Rio is located on a busy shopping street, on the ground floor of a well-kept-looking apartment building. A neighboring kiosk was also damaged in the explosion at the “Truth Lounge,” which opened in September 2025. And next to the shisha bar on the Zeil, where an attack was carried out almost simultaneously on Thursday morning, there is a hotel.
