The key facts

  • In Germany, children may have put dangerous objects into sweets themselves as a joke, which is supported by confessions in Thuringia and Bavaria.
  • There is an alternative investigative version that unknown individuals left fake sweets with nails and fingernails at the doorways of homes.
  • Incidents were recorded in the states of Thuringia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Bavaria; law enforcement is checking both versions.

The theory of pranks among children

In Germany, incidents are being investigated in which nails, fingernails and magnets were found in Halloween sweets collected by children. According to data from the DPA agency, cited by Christian Pfeiffer, former director of the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony, there is a theory that such acts may have been committed by the children themselves as a prank. The expert suggested that the idea may have arisen after social media posts about fake candies, which provoked a rapid spread of the idea among peers and attempts to copy it.

Confirmed cases

Journalists managed to document specific cases supporting the theory of children's involvement. In the state of Thuringia a nine-year-old girl herself stuck a wooden skewer into a chocolate bar. Similar confessions also came from Bavaria, where two cases of sweets being tampered with by children were recorded. Law enforcement agencies are currently checking these versions in order to establish the scale of the phenomenon and rule out the involvement of adult perpetrators.

An alternative version of the investigation

Despite the children's confessions, some investigators hold a different view, suggesting that the perpetrators did not hand out sweets in person, but placed fake sweets with dangerous objects in baskets at doorways. Earlier, the NTV portal reported that dangerous foreign objects had been found in the states of Thuringia and Rhineland-Palatinate. At this point, no final conclusion has been reached as to who was behind all the incidents, and the investigation continues.