Deborah Cole

speaker

337 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 5d ago

Deborah Cole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Today in Focus · The jailing of Germany’s most wanted woman · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

She was out at, every year in Kreuzberg, there's something called the Carnival of Cultures.

And this was founded about 30 years ago to celebrate Berlin's diversity.

So she joined that carnival almost every year.

Now this year, the carnival attracted 1.1 million people.

So she was out dancing in the streets and it also attracts a lot of press.

And so those press photographs might have been the thing that actually sealed her fate.

And investigative journalists from Bellingcat used this facial recognition software and used AI to do just a search like that and managed to find a press photo of her at this carnival of cultures.

Now, German authorities have been a little bit cagey about acknowledging whether they would have used that research at all and getting on her trail.

But the fact was that soon after this podcast came out, months later, she was arrested.

One of her alleged accomplices, Burkhard Gawig,

It has apparently also been cited in Berlin.

There have been all of these more or less dubious sightings of both him and this other accomplice of hers, Ernst Volker Staub.

And when the police went into her apartment, they found DNA evidence of both of them, including on an electric toothbrush.

So the three of them have apparently been in quite close contact over all these years, too, which, of course, would also be fraught with risk.

When there are three of you, you're going to be that much more visible than if there's only one.

And there's another sort of, you know, cinematic wrinkle to all of this is apparently the police burst into her apartment.

and immediately begin finding some of the evidence that she is who they think she is.

And then she asks them if, before she's carted away, she could just go to the bathroom briefly.

So she goes into her bathroom, and what does she do?

There's a cell phone in there, and she manages to send a message to Burkhard Gavig and warn him that she has been captured and that they need to know this.

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