On a drizzly Wednesday in March, Swiss police arrested a man standing alone at a Bitcoin A.T.M. near Geneva Airport, ending a nearly year-long manhunt. Hours earlier, the 61-year-old had reportedly bought a one-way ticket to Dubai. All that was left was to convert a supposedly large crypto-currency ransom he’d wrangled into cash. Then, presumably, he would vanish—leaving behind what federal authorities describe as a campaign of violence that had quietly terrorized Geneva.
Four attempted bombings are an anomaly in one of the world’s safest countries. Geneva, in particular, is home to the rich and discreet—where old-money families run private banks and travel to Alpine chalets on weekends. In a place of closed doors and quiet fortunes, violence such as this unnerves the public and punctures the illusion of control.
And most startling of all, these attacks had a bewildering target—Switzerland’s most renowned watchmaker, Patek Philippe.
The Bombmaker’s Trail
Last April, the suspect allegedly mailed his first explosive—a self-igniting gun—to a man in Plan-les-Ouates, a quiet suburb southwest of the city. The device, built from 3D-printed components, was nearly impossible to trace. It detonated on Rue Vélodrome before reaching its intended recipient.
The next explosion occurred four months later. On the morning of August 20, as a man was leaving the house to walk his dog, he noticed a leaking garbage bag near his apartment’s front door. He dragged it to a nearby bin and asked his daughter to bring him some paper towels to clean it up. A few moments before she returned, it exploded.
“It was so loud. I was screaming,” the man later told the local newspaper Tribune de Genève. “And it was whistling extremely loudly in my ears.” He sustained six fractures and a gash near his femoral artery.
The third attack, which took place in the leafy neighborhood of Grange-Canal in November, proved the most devastating. A bomb exploded when a 12-year-old daughter opened her mailbox. Among other serious injuries she sustained, a shred of metal lodged in her liver, requiring an hours-long emergency surgery. She is currently in stable condition but remains under medical supervision.
All the victims, it turns out, have something in common: ties to Patek Philippe. The first man, who was not injured, worked at the company, though his title has not been disclosed. And the injured man and the girl’s father were both executives.
In January, any lingering doubts about the target vanished: a booby-trapped bomb—designed to detonate when handled, opened, or stepped on—turned up at the watchmaker’s trusteeship office, in Geneva’s banking district. An alert employee spotted a suspicious package and called the police, who defused it just in time.
Between the blasts, the suspect allegedly sent a series of ransom notes. The demands started at $5.3 million and escalated to $27 million—to be paid entirely in crypto-currency. The man’s arrest, at the Bitcoin A.T.M., suggests that Patek Philippe may have quietly begun to comply.
Why go after Switzerland’s most storied watchmaker? Until two days ago, authorities remained tight-lipped. Then, on Thursday, the suspect confessed—admitting to planting the bombs and issuing the ransom demands. He claimed he acted alone, chasing a payout. He chose Patek Philippe, he said, simply because he believed they could afford to pay.
In keeping with its discreet reputation, Patek Philippe—valued at roughly $2 billion—declined to respond to our request for comment. In December, the police mistakenly arrested two brothers for the crimes, detaining one for almost six weeks. The pair are now seeking nearly $150,000 in compensation.
Nearly a year after the first explosion, a portrait of the suspect behind the bombs has begun to emerge. He wasn’t a seasoned criminal but a documentary photographer who had covered the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters and shot conflict zones from Syria to North Korea. On the side, he taught kung fu at the Ecole de Kung-Fu Genève and is well known in the city’s martial-arts circles.
“He was a star reporter,” one Swiss journalist told Air Mail. Most people who know him refused to speak on the record, and the few who did were stunned. “It’s beyond us,” one acquaintance said before referring us to their lawyer. Another, who had trained under the suspect for years, couldn’t reconcile the friendly instructor with the man now accused of planting bombs across the city.
In contrast, one neighbor described the suspect to the Tribune de Genève as a lonely, taciturn man. “He was strong as a bull,” he said. “But I often saw him eating alone at the bistro down the street.”
There were signs that the former photographer had been experiencing financial trouble. Last week, the Tribune de Genève reported that he had sublet his apartment. And the kung-fu school he ran had a checkered reputation: online reviews accuse it of double-billing families and ignoring refund requests.
“Pay attention to this school! It’s a scam!” one disgruntled parent wrote in a Google review. “I withdrew my son at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. But since then, [the school] has continued to send me invoices, and despite my letters, emails, and text messages, no one has responded.”
Another client said they were billed for two trial lessons—despite being told they were free. “I informed the gentleman that this is not the sport my daughter would want and a week later he sends me an invoice.”
As it turns out, the studio, in the Eaux-Vives neighborhood, may have been the key to the case. After a two-day search, police reportedly uncovered a stockpile of weapons and explosives there, according to the Tribune de Genève. When Air Mail called the school, the number had been disconnected.
In a statement, the suspect’s attorney said, “My client is cooperating with the authorities, as he has done from the beginning. He wishes to continue cooperating with the investigation and will provide his statements for the prosecuting authorities.”
Almost two weeks ago, a judge confirmed that the suspect will be detained for at least three months. A date for the first hearing has yet to be set.
Meanwhile, Patek Philippe’s employees will keep heading to their offices in the business district. And amid Geneva’s cobblestoned streets, residents will slip back into their routines, hoping for an ordinary spring on the tranquil shores of Lake Geneva.
Makana Eyre is a Paris-based American journalist. He is the author of Sing, Memory and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Foreign Policy
Phineas Rueckert is an award-winning investigative journalist and the lead project coordinator at Forbidden Stories
