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there. Skeleton Key, all episodes

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are there. So

0:27

the Kankampar group first

0:30

came to attention to the police in

0:32

about 2020, but they'd actually

0:34

been carrying out, they'd been

0:37

known locally and connected with assault since at

0:39

least They're

0:42

still on trial, so I'm not

0:44

going to mention their names because

0:46

Finnish media is quite specific about

0:48

not naming criminal suspects just

0:51

in case there's any risk of biasing

0:53

the trial, but they are easy to

0:55

identify. In

1:00

this group there were one, two,

1:03

three, four, five people and

1:06

they had a history going back to

1:08

at least 2014 of basically going

1:10

round and attacking local people

1:12

and businesses that they were associated with

1:15

ethnic minorities in this town. Kankampar

1:18

is about three hours drive

1:20

north west of Helsinki. So

1:26

in 2014 they did an assault at

1:28

a hot dog stand and threatened to

1:30

slit someone's throat and beat someone up

1:32

with an iron bar. They

1:36

in between 2019 and 2021 there

1:38

were a series of attacks often

1:41

targeting art students in the town

1:44

and also particularly singling out anyone

1:47

of a non-white background who was

1:49

with the students. So

1:53

just going up and violently

1:55

beating people, waiting for

1:58

them outside restaurants and bars and stuff. things.

2:01

So far, this is all, it's

2:04

relatively typical in terms of, you

2:06

know, a lot of

2:08

fairly backwater towns will have like

2:10

a local skinhead group who are

2:13

just menacing people and being malevolent.

2:17

But in January 2020, all

2:20

five of them were detained by the

2:22

police on firearms

2:24

and explosives offences. And

2:27

they were suspected of trying to procure explosive

2:29

devices and having

2:32

been connected to the theft

2:35

of some fertiliser. So

2:38

this puts it up a notch. However, and

2:42

this is what's confusing for me reading

2:44

about this is the

2:46

police detained them and then let them

2:48

go again and they immediately seem to

2:50

have gone back to their activity. There

2:53

was another attack, less

2:55

around just over a year after

2:58

they got detained, where

3:00

they attacked another group of students at

3:03

a grill on the outskirts of Kankanpa.

3:06

And in that same month,

3:08

this is May 2021, they

3:10

were recorded by the police who obviously had the month

3:12

of surveillance by now visiting

3:14

two different clubhouses in

3:17

Karava and Murame, two

3:20

other Finnish towns. And these clubhouses were run by

3:22

an organisation called Crew 38. And

3:26

Crew 38 is a sort of a branch

3:30

in some way of the hammer

3:32

skins. And I know hammer skins

3:35

have come up on the podcast quite a few

3:37

times before, especially in connection to Rise Above Movement.

3:39

I know Allie's talked a lot about them. But

3:42

they are sort of one of

3:45

the older big American

3:47

white supremacist gangs, effectively,

3:49

and they have a huge reach

3:51

in Europe and they're particularly associated

3:54

in Europe with, for

3:56

example, they run an

3:58

MMA tournament in Germany called the

4:00

Kampf, the Nibelungen, and Nat attracts

4:03

sort of Nazis, including people from Blood

4:05

and Honor and Combat 18 from all

4:07

over Europe come and attend that. So

4:10

they're a big international network and

4:13

although they're older and so people

4:16

give them a lot less attention than the

4:18

sort of very online, you know, people who,

4:20

people at Atomwaffen who make a lot of, you

4:22

know, attention to graphics and stuff,

4:25

the Hammerskins are actually a really dangerous

4:27

and really important network when you look

4:29

at these international far-right groups.

4:31

And in the same way Royce Above

4:34

Movement is almost an offshoot of Hammerskins.

4:36

Right, the Hammerskins would be comparable more

4:38

to like the Aryan Brotherhood as a

4:41

really fully legitimized, violent,

4:43

neo-Nazi gang. They're not just like

4:45

a political movement, they're like serious

4:47

criminals, right? Yeah, yeah, they're not

4:49

movementarians having conferences like some of

4:52

the other guys we'll talk about

4:54

in this. So

4:58

they're going to two of

5:00

their clubhouses and having meetings. We don't know that

5:02

they were ever patched up and members of them.

5:05

We've not seen any evidence of that, but they

5:07

were clearly talking to

5:09

these guys frequently. A

5:13

few months after that they create, they

5:15

actually founded an organization, all five people

5:17

who were later arrested, founded a sort

5:20

of a

5:22

kickboxing club called Soul Sport. And

5:25

it's so you can actually trace who

5:28

the people that were that were detained, even though they're not

5:30

named in media, because you can see the kickboxing

5:33

association that they created and the legal

5:35

records attached to that. And

5:37

it was only only two months after that, so December 3rd,

5:39

2021, that they were arrested in a huge

5:43

operation involving counterterrorism police

5:45

with Europool support. So

5:47

what had happened in the meantime, so we

5:50

know that they were

5:52

engaging with other known far

5:55

right groups who are dangerous by hammer

5:57

skins, but also the police in

6:00

the intelligence they were collected, began to

6:02

suspect that they had been connected

6:04

to the

6:06

2015 incident. So like

6:09

way back before they first came

6:11

on the police radar, where a

6:13

refugee reception center in Niinissalo nearby

6:16

was burned down shortly before it was due

6:19

to open in an arson attack.

6:22

And the police, when they eventually

6:25

raided these guys, found that they

6:27

had been discussing

6:29

and planting details of the

6:31

refugee center and what

6:33

was there. So

6:36

what they found in the end

6:38

was that they'd collected a lot of weaponry

6:41

and that included

6:43

dynamite, fertilizers, collection

6:45

of coconuts. That

6:48

was a preview from our Patreon

6:50

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6:55

it and get the other episodes

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