German police investigate after Lidl letter-bomb explosion
German supermarket chain Lidl has said it is in “shock” after a letter bomb exploded at its headquarters in southern Germany.
Three people were injured, one seriously, when the package
was opened at the company’s main administrative building in Neckarsulm, an hour
north of Stuttgart, on Wednesday.
Police say it may have been one in a series of suspicious
packages delivered this week in the area, including one to a local factory
producing the Capri Sun juice drink.
About 100 employees were evacuated from Lidl’s headquarters
after the letter-bomb explosion and a helicopter ambulance was seen in the car
park. Local media reported that police investigators worked at the scene of the
explosion into the evening.
Neckarsulm mayor Steffen Hertwig urged local post office
staff, as well as locals, to be particularly vigilant about packages in the
coming days.
“Above all packages with no sender or are conspicuous in any
way, please be particularly careful,” he said.
Police spokesman Gerald Olma from the nearby city of
Heilbronn said on Thursday there was still no obvious motive for the attack but
that forensic specialists were examining what remained of the package.
The company said in a statement: “We are deeply shocked by
the event and wish our employees a good and speedy recovery.”
Lidl ordered employees at its southern German base to remain
at home until further notice, a recommendation that was also issued for a local
training campus with links to Lidl’s 81-year-old founder Dieter Schwarz.
Mr Schwarz is known as “the phantom” in Germany for his
spectacularly low profile, and guesstimates about the scale of his fortune go
as high as €41.5 billion. The main source of his wealth is the Lidl discount
chain he founded in 1973, which operates today in 32 countries with nearly
11,000 stores.
Another chain in the group called Kaufland, with larger
stores and a wider product range, operates about 1,300 stores in central
Europe.
Annual turnover of €104bn
Executives who have worked with Mr Schwarz say his main
ambition was to imitate the Aldi supermarket chain and overtake it, which his
retail group has now achieved.
Measured by its annual turnover of €104 billion, the Schwarz
Group is the third-largest company in Germany. The Schwarz family’s retail
genes stretch back to 1930 and the fruit import business of Dieter’s father.
Lidl is no stranger to targeting by criminals. In 2017 a
German court sentenced two men to prison sentences after they threatened to
poison food in Lidl stores unless the firm paid €5 million. To prove they were
serious, the two men added pesticide to chocolate spread, toothpaste and
gingerbread products and slipped them on to the shelves in three locations.
The sentencing judge said the two men had gotten their
pesticide dosages wrong: “You’d have had to eat a tonne of gingerbread to even
notice anything.”
The Schwarz group is privately owned and just a handful of
pictures are known to exist of its founder, who withdrew from day-to-day
management of the firm in 1999.
Keeping a low profile is something Mr Schwarz learned from
Theo Albrecht, a co-founder of Aldi. In 1971 Albrecht was kidnapped on his way
home from work and only released after 17 days when his wife paid a seven
million Deutsche Mark (€3.5 million) ransom.
His kidnappers were later arrested and nearly half the
ransom recovered. Later Mr Albrecht won a court battle with the tax authorities
for the right to write off the ransom as a legitimate business expense.
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