When the news of the bombing came out,
it was a massive story in Germany.
We are following some breaking news coming to us
out of Dortmund in Germany.
It was covered by all of the media outlets.
Three roadside explosions triggered
at the same time last night,
as a coach left its hotel in the south of Dortmund.
Public figures commented on it.
We should not let them affect our life whoever it was.
The media echo went far beyond Dortmund.
I think it was front page news
in every single big paper around Europe.
Everyone thought of like a terrorist attack
and people were scared that throughout the city in Dortmund,
there was more attacks to be happening.
Unbeknownst to investigators just after the bomb went off
and the players of the team were shell shocked,
the person who had masterminded the attack
was actually sitting in the hotel,
eating steak and sweet potatoes.
My name is Thomas Rogers.
I'm the journalist who wrote the article
The Get Rich Quick Scheme
That Nearly Killed a German Soccer Team.
Dortmund is a mid-sized city in the western part of Germany
in the state called North Rhine-Westphalia.
And it's a former industrial city
that's kind of fallen on hard times in the last few decades.
It was severely bombed in the war.
So the center of the city is quite stark.
Some of the few high points includes its soccer team.
My name is Eyk Henning,
I'm a reporter with Bloomberg news
and I'm a great fan of Borussia Dortmund.
Dortmund fans are super loyal.
On all match days the entire city is in black and yellow,
it's like a religion.
I think more than most German cities,
soccer does play a very large role
in the identity of Dortmund.
In October of 2000,
the BVB became the first team in the Bundesliga
to actually go public.
Salaries for soccer players in the Bundesliga
have gone up very dramatically.
With such high prices they thought that by going public,
they would be able to compete better
with big teams like Bayern Munich.
Unfortunately, that didn't go too well.
Dortmund bought too many expensive players, high wages,
and the club almost went bust in 2005.
But the price of their shares, it has sometimes gone up,
but mostly gone down since they made that decision.
So on April 11th, 2017
the team was staying in a hotel
on the outskirts of Dortmund.
Match days are always special in Dortmund
everyone is looking forward to it.
The team always meets in the same hotel ahead of matches.
They stayed in this hotel
in order to have a kind of a neutral space before games
so that they could concentrate be sort of isolated
from distractions, things like that.
Everyone was pretty optimistic they had a chance
to go really far, maybe into the finals.
I was in the office and getting ready for match day,
was gonna meet with a friend
a fellow Dortmund supporter in a pub.
As always the fans are very excited about matches.
On that day, they were heading to play in the quarter-final
against AS Monaco at Signal Iduna stadium,
which is in the center of Dortmund.
Shortly before 7:00 PM,
the players of the team bordered their official team bus.
When the bus took off the parking lot of the hotel
and turned on the street there were three detonations,
three bombs that exploded and hit the bus of Dortmund.
Three explosions occurred,
close to the Borussia Dortmund team bus.
The B team bus had just left the hotel.
The explosions destroyed two windows
in the rear part of the bus.
People screamed,
people jumped to the ground.
The fellow Dortmund fan
I was supposed to watch the match with,
he called me and said "Turn on the TV,
there was an attack on the Dortmund bus".
And I thought that was impossible.
Some of the players screamed at the driver
to keep driving as fast as possible
because they were worried that people might storm the bus.
German investigators said the explosive devices
used in the attack on the Borussia Dortmund bus
contained metal pins.
One had pierced a seat head rest.
Unbeknownst to the team members
the actual mastermind behind the attack
was as they were disembarking the bus,
was actually eating steak and sweet potatoes
at the hotel they had just left.
Authorities are attempting to verify
a letter left at the scene,
claiming jihadists were behind the attack.
Because there had been a series of attacks
by Islamic terrorists in Germany and Europe,
there was a widespread suspicion in the media
that this was another Islamic terror attack.
Three letters were found at the site of the bombing
that took credit for the attack on behalf of Islamic State.
There were however reasons
to doubt this particular narrative.
It would actually be a surprise
if ISIS were actually part of this attack.
Possibly, could be, employed by other groups
like the far-right wing to try and shift the blame.
The letters had some strange qualities.
They were written in a strange German
that used big sophisticated words,
but had basic grammar mistakes
as if someone was native German speaker,
but pretending to be a foreign person.
Federal investigators have detained one man,
suspected of links to Islamist terrorism.
One of two suspects whose apartments
were raided this morning.
Shortly after the bombing,
a man in Austria named Rudolf, who was a big BVB fan,
he noticed that something strange was going on
on the stock market related to the team shares.
He emailed the lawyers of BVB
who then forwarded that email on to investigators.
The email stated that someone
had bought 60,000 BVB put options.
A wager that the value of the shares of the team
would fall below a certain amount, at a certain date.
Why would someone buy that ahead of a match
and then three bombs go off?
Something, something isn't right here.
For the person to make money off of that
it required the stock to go down quite a bit
in a fairly short period of time.
And it wouldn't just be the team losing a match
it would require something much bigger than that.
There was another big red flag about this purchase,
which is the fact that it had actually been made
number one on the day of the bombing,
but also from an IP address that had been traced
to the actual hotel where the bombing had taken place.
When three explosions targeted the bus,
carrying the Borussia Dortmund footballers on April 11th
written notes left at the scene claimed the attack
was the work of ISIL.
The truth as is now alleged, is remarkable.
On April 21st, the police arrested a man
in a southern German city called Tübingen.
He was on his way to work
and his name was Sergej Wenergold.
He seemed like an unlikely suspect
because he had no known connections
to the Islamic terror world.
He didn't seem like a far-right extremist,
he didn't seem like a left-wing extremist either.
He seemed to be a completely unremarkable young man.
A 28-year-old German-Russian man named only as Sergej. W,
stayed in the same hotel as the players
on the night before the bombing.
He specifically requested an upper room,
overlooking the bushes
where the explosive devices were hidden.
The media dissected why he would do that.
What was his past?
He had been inspired by the 2015 terror attack in Paris.
And he noticed that in the aftermath of the attack,
the stocks of French companies went down
and he believed that if an attack took place,
that was directed at a specific company
that the decrease in stock price for that company
would be even more dramatic.
It never occurred to anyone
that someone would do that out of greed.
We now know that the suspect
bought three different derivatives
on the Borussia Dortmund shares.
With all these derivatives he bet on falling shares.
The suspect bought the majority of these financial products
on the 11th of April.
The day of the attack.
If the plot had been completely successful
and the stock had reached a value of zero,
Wenergold would have made up to €570,000
or the equivalent of about $608,000.
Ultimately the plan completely backfired.
The attacker Sergej Wenergold didn't make any money.
In fact, he lost money.
In court he would be extremely quiet.
He usually kept his hands clasped together.
One of the lawyers actually commented that
he had never seen a defendant act so calmly.
Wenergold had served some time in the German military.
From that information and from online research,
he was able to figure out how to assemble
remote detonated bombs that would do what he hoped to do.
There were a few days of extremely emotional testimony,
including the soccer players who described doubting
whether or not they could ever play another game again.
It brought everything back up
and it didn't quite help them to kind of process
what was going on.
Throughout it all he sat there completely silent.
The big mystery that was swirling around the trial
was the question of why?
He may have simply done it because he wanted to impress a woman.
Rebecca is a young woman who has a very troubled home life.
She ultimately sees her relationship with Wenergold
as an opportunity to leave that troubled home.
Wenergold is a Russian immigrant to Germany,
he speaks with an accent,
he has anxiety in large groups of Germans.
She begins to resent the fact that he has these fears
and feels a little bit trapped.
Rebecca attempts to dump him on multiple occasions
and he threatens to commit suicide if she leaves him.
Wenergold apparently told Rebecca
that she would soon be seeing a surprise.
After being dumped via text message,
he apparently began planning for this attack in earnest.
Wenergold was charged with 28 counts of attempted murder,
which carried a maximum sentence in Germany
of life in prison.
He claimed that he had nothing to do with the attack,
but as time went on,
he admitted that he had actually been the person
who had built the explosives and had set them off.
But he claimed that he didn't want to actually kill anybody.
Ultimately Wenergold didn't receive
the harshest possible sentence.
He was given 14 years in prison,
but it's still a considerable amount in jail, in Germany.