Like a scene from an action-packed Matt Damon movie, masked men stormed the European Poker Tour on March 6 at Berlin’s Grand Hyatt Hotel and made off with a portion of the tourney’s prize pool as people scrambled for cover from the gunmen’s assault rifles and hand-grenades. Caught on camera, you can watch video footage of the heist in all its dramatic glory. The EPT had over 1,000 players and reportedly, play resumed several hours after the robbery.
EPT winner Kevin MacPhee was interviewed on The Early Show via satellite from Berlin to talk about what went down.
“We heard some screaming and yelling and we weren’t sure what was really going on,” MacPhee told Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez. “There was a lot of panic and the TV stage started to collapse. When that started to happen, all of the players got up out of their seats to see what was happening.”
Now, two weeks later, the fifth and final suspect and apparent mastermind behind the heist, a 28-year-old Lebanese citizen, has been arrested. The unnamed man was also the driver of the getaway car.
Last week, the first of the group turned himself into the police alongside his lawyer and identified three other accomplices as Ahmad el-Awayti, 20, Jihad Khaled Chetwie, 19, and Mustafa Ucarkus, 20. Chetwie and Ucarkus had fled Germany, only to return and surrender.
Although the suspects had made off with over €240,000, they left behind a bag containing €600,000. The head of the German police union, Rainer Wendt declared the robbers were clearly an amateur group who had, “plunged to new depths of stupidity” and left behind “a mountain of evidence.”
While the police are now focusing their efforts on recovering the money, speculation about the motivation behind Lebanese citizens robbing a Berlin poker tournament continues. The German newspaper Bild proposed that the robbery is related to warring Arab mafia families. At this point, Bild offers little more than supposition, but the strange qualities of this case do beg an explanation beyond simple greed.
With the last suspect in custody, the police are now focusing their efforts on recovering the money.
Meanwhile, security at the EPT Snowfest poker tournament currently running in the Austria is reportedly much tighter than usual.
“The situation at the Alpine Palace Hotel is not comparable to what the situation at the Berlin hotel was,” said Arno Kosmata, the head of the local police department in a statement to Bluff Europe. “There will not be a large sum of money on hand. The hotel will be well protected.”
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