Hamburg - Police were unravelling Friday the mystery of how a convicted robber spent nine years on the run in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, using assumed names and continuing to earn his living by crime. The handcuff clicked for Thomas Wolf, 56, one of Germany's most wanted men, in Hamburg's red-light district on Thursday evening after a tip-off from the public.
In Hamburg, police said Wolf revealed under interrogation that he had spoken to unsuspecting police officers several times down the years.
The German media has been filled for the past two months with reports of sightings of Wolf as he moved about the country, renting cars, staying in hotels or living rough, always a jump ahead of the police.
"Wolf was very clever and planned everything in the greatest detail," the senior Frankfurt detective who led the hunt, Matthias Weber, said.
In 2000, Wolf had failed to return from day release to a jail where he was serving 21 years for robbery and other crimes. He resumed his previous career of crime, including holdups in the Netherlands and Belgium, and lived for several years in a Frankfurt apartment under an assumed name.
His most recent exploit was kidnapping the wife of a German bank executive this year in Frankfurt. He freed her unharmed for a ransom of 1.8 million euros (2.5 million dollars).
Police said Wolf was unarmed when arrested. Weber said that even then, the suspect remained calm, denying he was Wolf till this was proved by fingerprinting. Wolf refused to say where he had hidden the ransom.
