Thousands of serious crimes are committed by clans in North Rhine-Westphalia every year. In addition, there is a high number of unreported cases: crimes that are not recorded by the police because victims – often out of fear – do not report them. Between 2016 and 2018, 14,225 clan crimes were recorded in North Rhine-Westphalia. Many of them in the context of violent crime. The trend is rising.It was not easy for the police to identify the number of clans in North Rhine-Westphalia. “We have clan members with Turkish citizenship, some with Lebanese papers and some with German passports,” says the investigator Thomas Jungbluth. However, Jungbluth and his team did not get anywhere with the use of nationality alone. The State Criminal Police Office contacted colleagues in Lower Saxony and Bremen who had been dealing with the criminal groups for a long time. From there they got the tip that some extended families are recorded by different spellings. “That’s how we came up with the number of around 100 clans that we have currently identified,” says Jungbluth. Previously, it was assumed that there were only around 50 extended families in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Germany is a “prey” for Arab clans. This is the conclusion of the Islamic scholar Ralph Ghadban, who published the book “Arab Clans – the Underestimated Danger” in 2018.
Just how dangerous the clans are is something the author is currently experiencing personally. Ghadban, who was born in Lebanon in 1949 and came to Germany in 1972 to study, says he gets threats from the “Family Union”, an association of widely ramified clans in Germany.Although the scientist’s book was published in autumn 2018, there were no responses out of the clan community for a long time. Only recently has the author been massively threatened. The background to this is probably an interview he gave to a Lebanese television station in April in Arabic. After the broadcast, the video of the interview also went viral in Germany. According to the clans, Ghadban had defiled the honour of the members.Especially on social media, the 70-year-old is being met with a wave of hatred. Ghadban is insulted in videos. In addition, he is threatened with violence and even murder on the internet – some of the threats were published under people’ s real names. In one video it is said that the author’s face will be used to “wipe the floor and shoes”. Another video says: “We’ll find you, no matter where you are. And we will step on your head.”
The author then reported to the police and filed a criminal complaint. Ghadban is now under police protection. For security reasons, he himself does not want to comment on the threats against his person to the newspaper WESTFALEN-BLATT. The author does not want to provoke the clans any further for the time being. That is what the police officers advised him to do.
However, Ghadban explains succinctly in an interview with the newspaper: “For you it’s about an article for the newspaper, for me it’s a matter of my own survival! A sentence that shows how serious the situation is for the scientist.