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                <p>FRANKFURT (Reuters) – An airline stewardess struggling to lift her bag at a German airport led to the discovery of a 6-million euro ($8.4 million) coin fraud.</p>
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The customs officer who stopped the stewardess in early 2010 found thousands of one and two euro coins in her bag, Bild newspaper reported in its Thursday edition.</p>
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The incident sparked an investigation that has uncovered a forgery ring stretching to China and potentially implicating employees of German airline Lufthansa, the paper said.</p>
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The Frankfurt prosecutors' office said on Thursday it carried out dawn raids on offices and residences and arrested six people, four of whom are from China.</p>
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It suspects them of having smuggled coins that had been taken out of circulation or bits of those coins into Germany from China, where they had been sent as scrap metal.</p>
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The suspects then put the coins back together and exchanged them for a total of 6 million euros at the Bundesbank from 2007 to 2010, the prosecutors said.</p>
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Airline cabin crew do not have a weight limit on their baggage, prosecutors highlighted in a statement.</p>
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There was no suspicion of any wrongdoing on the part of Bundesbank employees, the prosecutors' office added.</p>
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The Bundesbank said in a statement it was aware of the investigation into the use of scrapped coins. It also said that no Bundesbank employees were subject to the investigation.</p>
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A Lufthansa spokesman on Thursday said it was aware that individual employees were under investigation, but said the group could not comment on the investigation.</p>
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Old euro coins are taken out of circulation by removing the inner part of the coin from an outer ring and thus effectively turning them into scrap metal.</p>
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The investigators recovered around 3 tonnes of coin pieces as well as a machine for putting them back together, prosecutors said in the statement.</p>
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The Bundesbank is the only institute in Europe that exchanges damaged euro coins for free, replacing them with new ones of the same value.</p>
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(Reporting by Victoria Bryan, Alexander Huebner and Sakari Suoninen, editing by Paul Casciato)</p>
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($1=.7110 euros)</p>
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