Last week’s bombing attack against the Borussia Dortmund team bus was initially speculated to be a work of a fanatical fan, and later was linked to terrorism, with letters claiming ISIS was behind it. It turns out neither was true, and the real motive for the attack was stock market manipulation.
The attacker, identified as a Russian-German national, reportedly took out a loan of tens of thousands of Euros and bought puts on Borussia Dortmund stock, meaning he would profit substantially if the price of the stock dropped. He then tried to make sure that happened by bombing the bus.
The bombings didn’t have a huge impact, wounding a single defenseman, and the stock barely budged. The stock did go down a bit more later, after Dortmund lost its match against Monaco, but the puts the attacker reportedly bought would’ve depended on him cutting the price roughly in half to make the profits he envisioned.
It appears the attacker left letters claiming it was an ISIS attack to try to divert investigators from him, and while German officials indeed used this as a pretext to detain a handful of Muslims, they still caught the actual attacker too.