Germany’s Telegram rape network: medical graduate gets five years

Updated and corrected October 5, 2026. Adds the July Berlin verdict and September developments in a separate UK case, and corrects group-size, case-linkage and encryption claims. The original date and byline are unchanged.

Berlin Regional Court I sentenced a 32-year-old man with medical training to five years in prison on July 8, finding him guilty of assisting an aggravated rape and three counts of aggravated sexual coercion. The court’s announcement says he belonged to an eight-man Telegram group and advised on incapacitating women. German reporting identifies him as Zhiting S.

The judgment adds to the known outcomes in the German cases associated with the so-called “driving school” chats. Dapeng Z. received 14 years in Frankfurt, Zhongyi J. 11 years and three months in Munich, and Tong Z. five years and nine months in Berlin. The cases have separate judgments and procedural histories.

The Berlin court found that Zhiting S. gave drug advice on January 6, 2024 knowing another participant intended to rape a woman; the other man followed the advice and committed the offence the next day. It also found three sexual assaults against his then-fiancée in Beijing hotels in 2020 and 2021, using seized video evidence. The announcement cited section 7(2)(2) of Germany’s Criminal Code for jurisdiction over the conduct in China, not unrestricted worldwide jurisdiction.

AP reported that defence lawyer Ehssan Khazaeli acknowledged his client’s membership of a chat group but denied that he had supplied meaningful advice. That was the defence’s position, distinct from the court’s finding of guilt. The court said the judgment could be challenged on points of law before Germany’s Federal Court of Justice.

Eight participants and a group of thousands are different counts

The “driving school” was a name used for a chat group, not a physical school. Court records and reporting describe discussions about drugging women, committing assaults and distributing images. Munich’s court confirmed that Zhongyi J. communicated with a man already convicted at first instance in Frankfurt and another defendant in Berlin.

The newspaper taz’s investigation distinguishes an eight-person closed group from other chats found on Zhongyi J.’s phone, including one with more than 4,500 members. That figure is neither a court-established count of offenders nor a victim count. It does not establish a single organisation of convicted perpetrators operating across more than 20 countries.

Courts relied on more than the vocabulary. In Munich, judges examined videos stored on the defendant’s hard drive and chat records, finding seven assaults against a woman with whom he had a relationship. He admitted the sexual offences but denied intent to kill. The court nevertheless convicted him of attempted murder and other offences. It reserved a later decision on preventive detention; it did not order that detention to follow automatically.

Reports and digital evidence led police to other participants

An October 21, 2024 notice from China’s Frankfurt consulate, based on German police information, described a suspect believed to be Chinese who impersonated a woman when responding to rental advertisements on WeChat and Xiaohongshu. The notice said Chinese and German authorities were cooperating. These were investigative statements at the time, not court findings already made.

Frankfurter Rundschau’s account of the February 2026 verdict says Dapeng Z. was arrested at his workplace in Raunheim in November 2024. The court found aggravated rapes against seven women and treated four cases as attempted murder. Police recovered large quantities of images and videos, whose analysis helped identify other participants. A file count cannot be equated with separate offences or individual victims.

Telegram told taz that sexual-violence content was prohibited and removed when detected, without addressing this specific group in detail. Its official FAQ distinguishes cloud chats from secret chats: groups use server-client encryption, not end-to-end encryption. The earlier article’s explanation of the group’s secrecy on the basis of end-to-end encryption was technically wrong.

Separate UK case awaits a decision on additional evidence

The case of Zhenhao Zou in Britain offers a comparison in evidence gathering, but the public material reviewed does not establish his membership of Germany’s eight-man group. The Crown Prosecution Service confirms that he was sentenced on June 19, 2025 to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 24 years, for 28 offences including rapes of ten women. In June 2025, London police said 24 further women had reported concerns after an appeal. That was not a finding of 24 additional proven crimes.

The Metropolitan Police said on September 7 that the new file included evidence of alleged rape and administering a substance with intent to commit a sexual offence. It covered five women who made reports and two alleged rapes involving two unidentified women. Submission to prosecutors is not a charge or conviction. No decision on additional charges had been made when the announcement was issued. Separate inquiries into alleged offences in China continued through formal international legal processes.

In the German cases, recorded images helped identify defendants and locate women who had not been identified. taz’s court reporting describes individual victims who learned of assaults only after police contacted them; it does not establish that every victim had the same experience. A complete count of victims across the related German groups has not been provided in the public material reviewed.

Corrections: The earlier article combined larger-chat membership, cases in different countries and unverified suspects without sufficient evidence. It withdraws claims of a single 20-country network, shared group membership by the British defendant, a documented global drug-supply chain and specific unverified suspects’ procedural status. This revision adds July’s Berlin verdict and September’s UK developments, corrects Telegram’s encryption description and does not infer later appeal results from earlier reports.