KTS Freiburg receives money and evidence back over 3.5 years after an illegal raid

After the Baden-Württemberg Administrative Court had ruled in the last instance in autumn 2020 that the search of the autonomous cultural center KTS in August 2017 in connection with the ban on the constructed association Indymedia Linksunten was unlawful, the KTS finally also has the large amount of money and money confiscated at the time get the evidence back. According to KTS, it was more than 30,000 euros. The KTS said in a communiqué this Sunday. We document the comminiqué at this point.

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KTS Freiburg receives evidence back after an illegal raid

Release vom 25.04.2021

Three and a half years ago the police raided the KTS Freiburg. At half past five in the morning, on August 25, 2017, the State Criminal Police Office from Stuttgart searched all KTS rooms and took away what was valuable. Documents, computers and money, a lot of money. Doors were broken into, safes torn from the walls, even coffee tills looted. The Administrative Court of Baden-Württemberg ruled in October 2020: The raid was illegal. In April 2021, the seized exhibits and the money were finally surrendered.

After the raid, the money was paid into an account at the federal treasury in Trier. More than thirty thousand euros is a lot of money for an autonomous center in which everything is as non-commercial as possible. Instead of collecting donations for political projects, the KTS first had to plug the hole in its own pocket. All the money was confiscated as alleged “association assets” of the left-wing radical news site linksunten.indymedia.org. Of course there was never a linksunten club. A radical left-wing media project is the opposite of German club dairy and the KTS is something like the antithesis of a clubhouse.

The computers were handed over to a joint police and secret service team for decryption. The LKA, the Federal Police and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution have worked together for three years on a perfectly normal Linux encryption. On the day of the raid, the LKA was supposed to bring confiscated lists of members to the VS so that the secret service could name further targets. This working group is a blatant violation of the separation requirement between the police and the secret services.

The documents went to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne. The very same authority that, according to the case files, had sent an informant, Reinhold Kapteina, to several public meetings of Indymedia linksunten: “The BfV has intelligence information volume (nd volume) for the 12th meeting of ‘linksunten.indymedia.org’, which took place in the period took place from February 1st to 3rd, 2013 at the ‘Kulturtreff in Selbstverwaltung’ (KTS) in Freiburg / Breisgau. “The then VS boss Hans-Georg Maaßen has been in temporary retirement since November 2018 because he denied the Nazi hunt in Chemnitz. His federal office was able to sniff our records for over three years, even though it was illegal to obtain these records.

Since the raids there have been several recruitment attempts by the secret service in the vicinity of the KTS. We always find it scandalous when state authorities try to seduce people into betrayal. But trying to recruit minors to be informer is remarkably vile. And it’s illegal too.

In June 2020, the Ministry of the Interior and the Badische Zeitung used the raid at the time to launch a political attack on KTS and Antifa. The CDU state interior ministry campaigned with the mayor of Freiburg for an end to the support of the KTS and the Badische Zeitung tried to achieve the same with the Freiburg municipal councils. But without success, because the liberal Freiburg knows how important an autonomous center is in the fight against right-wing radicals and reactionaries.

KTS stays!

Release vom 25.04.2021
KTS Freiburg

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