German man suspected of drugging and raping dozens of women

A Berlin man has been charged with nearly two dozen counts of raping unconscious women and filming them, while investigators believe, based on video footage, that the suspect may have attacked as many as 60 victims, The Guardian reported.

In the latest in a series of high-profile cases involving serial rapes of unwitting victims on camera, Berlin prosecutors said they have charged a 68-year-old German man with 22 sexual assaults on 14 women. The man, an electrician, has been in custody since March.

Since the suspect is believed to have filmed each rape, "it is suspected that all crimes were committed with a simultaneous violation of the right to protection of one's own image," the Berlin public prosecutor's office said.

During the ongoing investigation, "numerous alleged crimes committed against a total of 58 women have been uncovered," prosecutors said, adding that the identities of ten women have not yet been determined.

"The defendant is suspected of putting women to sleep with various sleeping pills combined with alcohol, and then raping them," prosecutors said, adding that he had previously lured them through online dating platforms.

The women believed to have been attacked, who have already spoken to investigators, said they had no memory of the alleged attacks and that they "only learned about them after footage of the crimes was found," the Guardian reports.

Prosecutors said the suspect has not yet entered a plea to the charges against him.

The cases were discovered after a tip-off from police in another German state, Lower Saxony, who were investigating similar allegations against a man who has since died in early 2025. It is believed that he had been in contact with the Berlin suspect via the internet.

The tip-off prompted a search of the suspect's apartment in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde neighborhood, during which police found a large amount of digital files. In 2026, an investigator found several videos of sexual assaults in which the suspect is suspected of being the attacker.

Police raided his home again in March this year and took him into custody. The charges echo similar cases reported this year in Berlin and Munich, which involved serial sexual assaults on drugged women, filmed on camera.

German media drew parallels with the case of Frenchwoman Giselle Pellico, whose then-husband was convicted of drugging and abusing her, and then, while she was unconscious, offering dozens of unknown men to rape her over the course of almost ten years, in a process that attracted worldwide attention.

"Peliko is not an isolated case," Judge Markus Koppenleitner said in Munich in April, sentencing a Chinese student to 11 years in prison for repeatedly giving his girlfriend anesthetics, raping her and filming the attacks.

The convicted man is believed to have been part of a group of abusers gathered in a Telegram group called “German Driving School,” which targeted women of Chinese origin living in Europe. “This is neither a Chinese nor a French phenomenon, but a phenomenon that exists in Germany and, ultimately, worldwide,” said Koppenleitner.

The Guardian recalls that investigators in the UK announced this month that they had uncovered a "truly international network" of organized drug-fueled sexual assaults, in which victims are drugged before being raped and sexually assaulted.