BERLIN (AFP) – German police were hunting Wednesday for thieves who made off with 10 truckloads of beer while the country was distracted by World Cup football fever.
“We’re following up on two or three leads,” said a police spokeswoman from the western city of Krefeld, where the pallets of beer were stolen from a warehouse some time between last Thursday evening and Monday morning.
The thieves carried away some 300,000 litres (80,000 gallons) of canned beer while Germans were transfixed by their team’s heroics in Brazil, beating Argentina in the final on Sunday.
Appealing for help from the public, police in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia said: “Has anyone noticed a very large amount of beer? Does anyone have information about where it could be stored?”
The police spokeswoman told AFP that there was no indication the beer had ended up in the hands of the vast and jubilant crowds who welcomed the national team home on Tuesday.
Goalkeeper Manuel Neuer downs a cold one during the welcome reception for Germany's national soccer team in Berlin Tuesday. He's not a suspect in the heist, having been in Brazil at the time.
BERLIN—As national euphoria gripped Germany on Tuesday with the arrival of its world champion soccer team, an apparent crime in the Rhineland served as a reminder that all was not well. Unidentified thieves, the police said, had spent the weekend stealing 10 truckloads of beer.
"Has anyone noticed a large amount of beer?" police in the city of Krefeld said in a news release. "Can anyone provide information on a possible storage area?"
Sometime after 5 p.m. last Thursday, the police say, thieves broke open a gate leading to the back of an unguarded warehouse. From there, they broke through another door leading into an office space and then to the warehouse itself. They loaded pallets of beer into tractor-trailers, drove them to an unknown location, and then returned for more. By Monday, when the theft was discovered, 300,000 liters—the equivalent of 140,891 U.S. six-packs—had disappeared, according to Krefeld police spokesman Acor Kniely.
By German consumption standards, to be sure, 10 truckloads of beer is little more than a drop in the barrel. According to statistics from the German Brewers' Federation, it would take Germans drinking at their 2013 pace approximately 18 minutes and 22 seconds to consume 300,000 liters of bee"We are talking about a variety of beer types," said Mr. Kniely. "However, I cannot say if it was bottled beer or canned beer or beer in another kind of container."The police announced the theft on Tuesday—around the time an estimatedone million people, many of them swigging from beer cups and bottles, toasted the German soccer team parading through Berlin.
Police said the trucks carrying the beer may have been spotted on the A40 Autobahn speeding east toward the city of Duisburg. The police there said they were aware of the investigation but would not comment.
Other details of the case were murky, like a good Hefeweizen. The Krefeld police wouldn't disclose the name of the warehouse's owner. A man who works at a business on the same street said by phone that the warehouse served as a storage facility for alcoholic beverages waiting to clear customs—the Dutch border is nearby— and a police official said customs had in fact reported the crime. But the local customs office said it did not use that warehouse.
The man said he had seen white truck cabs with foreign license plates and blue trailers pulling in and out of the warehouse all weekend. He said he saw three peopledoing the work. He had thought nothing of it, he said, until police contacted him about the theft on Monday. He asked not to be quoted by name about witnessing the theft because "we don't know who was behind it."
Mr. Kniely declined to comment on possible motives for the beer heist, including on whether it had anything to do with the World Cup, which according to news reports has caused a spike in beer-drinking in Germany.
"This is a very unusual case," Mr. Kniely said. "Someone must have noticed such a large amount being transported."
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