Report: Highest level of attacks on cash machines in Germany

According to a report, about 450 cash machines in Germany have been blown up so far this year.
This represents an all-time high for this offence, the Sunday edition of the newspaper Die Welt has reported in an article seen in advance by dpa.
The newspaper referred to participants at the conference of interior ministers of Germany's 16 federal states, which was held in Munich and ended on Friday.
Fewer ATMs were blown up in previous years: 414 in 2020 and 381 in 2021. Lower Saxony's Interior Minister Boris Pistorius spoke of 500 "completed and attempted offences" nationwide in 2022, according to the report.
Although the number of ATMs blown up in Germany continues to rise, the interior ministers at their meeting refrained from binding requirements for the banks to protect the money. For the time being, they would continue to rely on voluntary actions.
Die Welt reported with reference to the ministers' conference that the attacks are now increasingly being committed with explosives. This is a new and disturbing development, it said, as in the past criminals used gas mixtures for attacks.
Oliver Huth, regional chairman of the Association of German Criminal Investigators (BDK) in North Rhine-Westphalia, told the newspaper that people in the vicinity of the crime scene were acutely endangered: "Pedestrians have already been injured, metal parts have hit children's rooms, and houses were no longer habitable."