Three weeks after an arson attack on the Starlink satellite service near the Bulgarian capital Sofia, the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court (OLG) has imposed extradition detention on two 19-year-old Germans. The men from Duisburg and Moers were arrested in Duisburg last Friday. The Higher Regional Court and the Düsseldorf Public Prosecutor's Office said there were European arrest warrants from Bulgaria against them.
An OLG spokeswoman said it was a case of arson. She did not want to comment further in view of the responsible Bulgarian authorities. The crime scene is in Bulgaria and the Higher Regional Court will have to decide on the admissibility of extradition in due course, the statement said.
According to the arrest warrant, the 19-year-old suspects are said to have entered Serbia as tourists in a car with a German license plate and set fire to eight Starlink antennas south of Sofia on October 9th, as the Bulgarian news agency BTA reported. However, the men's defense lawyers want to challenge the arrest warrant.
The Starlink satellite network is a strategically important part of Ukraine's defense against Russia's war of aggression. At the end of September, a fire broke out in a Starlink terminal in Wolda Krobowska, south of Warsaw, which also ensured the security of internet operations in Ukraine. Two suspected saboteurs who are said to have carried out the attack were later arrested in Nürtingen near Stuttgart. The government in Warsaw suspects Russian secret services were behind the act of sabotage.
In Lithuania in mid-October an attempt was made to set Starlink systems on fire on company premises using fuel and Molotov cocktails. However, a security guard noticed the fire in time and major damage was prevented. The authorities there have now announced that two suspects are in custody in Germany. The basis is European arrest warrants from Bulgaria.
One of the suspected saboteurs has German and Turkish citizenship, the other has Serbian and German citizenship, said the deputy head of the Lithuanian criminal police, Saulius Briginas, according to a radio report in Vilnius. The suspects are also linked to October arson attacks on Starlink facilities in Poland and Bulgaria, Briginas said.
Although there is some evidence to suggest this, there was initially no confirmation that these two suspects were the men who were arrested in Duisburg on Friday and against whom the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court had imposed detention pending extradition. In response to a dpa query, a spokeswoman for the court said that the European arrest warrant from Bulgaria was only about the crime committed there.
According to the Bulgarian public prosecutor's office, the suspects in the attack near Sofia face prison sentences of three to twelve years. The German authorities justified the detention pending extradition, among other things, with the high expectation of punishment in the proceedings. There is therefore a risk that those being persecuted would evade the extradition process.
Under certain circumstances, German citizens can be extradited abroad for criminal prosecution. The prerequisite is, among other things, that the crime was essentially committed in the country concerned. In addition, the country must guarantee that after the trial has ended, the convicted people will be allowed to return to their home country to serve their sentence if they wish.
