An ex-soccer professional has kidnapped his daughter and that of his partner from Germany to Paraguy. While the corona deniers are asking for understanding for their actions in a bizarre video, they are being searched for feverishly. The girl’s mother’s lawyer told FOCUS Online that you could get information from the lateral thinker scene.
Lawyer Ingo Bott embarks on a hopeful trip to Paraguay on Thursday. “I’m confident that we’ll come home with a good result,” says the Düsseldorf lawyer from Düsseldorf to FOCUS Online. He represents Anne Maja Reiniger from Essen and Filip Blank, whose two underage daughters were kidnapped by their respective former spouses in the South American country. In November 2021, Andreas Egler, 45, and his new wife Anna, formerly Blank, took the girls on their odyssey.
In a farewell letter, the corona deniers justified their step by saying that the ripcord had to be pulled. There was talk of a “surveillance state” in which “human experiments” threatened.
For fear of a possible vaccination requirement, the couple staged the escape with eleven-year-old Lara Blank and ten-year-old Clara Egler. For the past six months, the parents from Germany who have been left behind have been doing everything they can to get the missing children back. In the meantime, prosecutors in Germany and overseas are looking for the German lateral thinkers and their daughters.
On Tuesday, the ABC newspaper reported that an abandoned getaway car belonging to the quartet had been found in the border area with Argentina. A suspected helper was also arrested. Lawyer Bott says that he and his colleague in Paraguay, Stephan Schultheiss, are in close contact with the responsible authorities.
A little later, the wanted couple published a video in which their daughters emphasized that they had come along voluntarily. There was no kidnapping. Andreas Egler, former German U-20 national soccer player, tries to give the impression of being unjustly persecuted in a melodramatic staging: “We are the Egler family, who are now wanted around the world like serious criminals, like murderers, like criminals,” said the man in his mid-forties. His wife Anna insists that they “just wanted to protect the children.” And now they want to separate them. They vehemently asked the authorities to stop searching for them.
Lawyer Bott considers the two-and-a-half-minute clip to be a farce: “The children speak as if they had rehearsed the sentences.” The surreal performance does not seem authentic at all.
In an open letter to the wanted people, Bott and his colleague appealed to the fleeing parents to get in touch. “The well-being of the children is not compatible with the life on the run that you have chosen,” it says. After the letter, the lawyer reports, there were already a number of clues as to the whereabouts of the fugitives. “Also from the lateral thinker scene.”
Father Filip Blank had previously sent an extremely moving message to his ex-wife via Facebook. “The police are on your trail,” he said on “his saddest Father’s Day.”
Once they were both “the best patchwork parents”, “the best separated parents that Lara ever had. Everyone envied us for that,” says Filip Blank. He knows that his ex-wife is not doing well with what she has done. It also cannot be that “Lara has been on the run for her whole life.” Blank described the kidnapping as a crime that destroyed a lot of trust, but “here too I will work to ensure that we finally get back together as a family. His lawyer Bott now wants to initiate this through his trip to Paraguay.
The tragic event is reminiscent of a spectacular case from 1995. At the time, the Austrian couple Pilhar left Austria to save their daughter Olivia, who was suffering from serious cancer, from urgently needed chemotherapy. With the blessing of the self-proclaimed Cologne cancer healer Ryke Hamer, the family fled from law enforcement as far as Malaga, Spain. There Hamer tried unsuccessfully to treat her with his abstruse methods.
After the Pilhars were forced to return, the six-year-old girl was saved by emergency operations in a Viennese clinic. Nevertheless, her father claims to this day that Olivia was already in a healing phase.
Today, Helmut Pilhar is regarded as a representative of the so-called “Germanic medicine”. A crude esoteric medical theory that goes back to his mentor. Tenor: the diseases are primarily psychological. His conclusion on the corona virus: “Doesn’t exist”. In the social networks, his abstruse messages find a big echo. Especially in the lateral thinker scene.
For a long time, Paraguay was considered an Eldorado for fugitive German corona deniers. Thanks to incorrect information about the messenger service Telegram, thousands of corona skeptics emigrated. During the virus pandemic, the country, which once took in fugitive Nazi criminals from the Third Reich, became a focal point for German-speaking conspiracy theorists. Mainly because entry is relatively easy. In addition, the government only introduced a vaccination certificate for travelers in April 2022.
According to the Neue Züricher Zeitung, the name “El Paraíso Verde” – the green paradise – is often used as a refuge for German lateral thinkers. A colony was founded around a German doctor couple in one of the most remote and poorest parts of Paraguay. As the English newspaper “The Guardian” reports, at least 2,200 Germans are said to have joined the community during the corona pandemic.
The German kidnapper couple and the girls Clara and Lara probably first sought refuge here. According to the “Spiegel”, at least four other children kidnapped by their parents are said to be in the region in addition to the schoolgirls. Where remains uncertain.
One thing is clear, time is pressing, the circle seems to be closing. It may only be a matter of time before the investigators find the fugitive Egler family and the girls Lara and Clara.
