An electrician’s odd plot to make $607,933.50
The bombs were ready to detonate when the black-and-yellow bus pulled into L’Arrivée Hotel & Spa, on the outskirts of Dortmund, Germany, on April 11, 2017. The driver, Christian Schulz, had arrived to take the players of
Borussia Dortmund, one of the country’s best soccer teams, to their Champions League tournament quarterfinal in nearby Signal Iduna Park. Dortmund was set to play AS Monaco and hoped to move a step closer to Europe’s most prestigious club trophy.
Shortly before 7 p.m., the players climbed aboard the bus. On schedule, Schulz set off on the 15-minute drive to the stadium near the center of Dortmund, a city of 600,000 that’s considered the faded capital of the German rust belt. Matthias Ginter, a soft-spoken 23-year-old center back, settled into a seat in the rear. Since joining the team in 2014, Ginter’s strong play has helped keep it near the top ranks of European soccer. He’d already lived through one of the most traumatic recent moments in the sport. Two years earlier, Ginter was playing in an exhibition match between the German and French national teams in Paris when three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the stadium, marking the beginning of a
terror attack that killed 130 people across the city. He rationalized it as the kind of thing that happens only once in a person’s life.
The three bombs in Dortmund were filled with metal pins and hidden on the side of the driveway, about midway between the hotel and the street. As the bus approached the road, the bombs exploded, sending a cloud of heat, dirt, and metal shooting through the air. One of the bus’s windows was punctured, and glass splinters flew through the interior. A pin shot into a headrest near center back Marc Bartra, barely missing his head. Schulz stepped on the gas and stopped a few hundred feet away. It seemed like a miracle: Aside from Bartra, who was put into an ambulance with an injured wrist, nobody was hurt. Most of the pins were scattered across the pavement.
No soccer team had ever been assaulted like this. In previous months in Germany, Islamic State terrorists had set off a suicide bomb at a music festival, killed nine people with a truck, and attacked train passengers with an ax. Two years earlier, a match between Germany and the Netherlands was called off after Israeli intelligence suggested an imminent bombing by Islamic extremists. Many in the German media assumed the same groups were behind this attack.
As police arrived, they had no way of knowing the bomber was in L’Arrivée’s restaurant, eating steak and sweet potatoes.