‘A hybrid attack’: Germany holds security meeting over explosive drone found near Ukraine plane

BERLIN - Chancellor Friedrich Merz convened Germany’s national security council on Aug 7 to discuss an explosive-laden drone found near a Ukrainian cargo plane and the mid-air collision of another aircraft with an unidentified object this week.

While Germany has not blamed anyone for the incident at Leipzig-Halle airport in the early hours of Aug 5, the Russian embassy in Berlin called the discovery a deliberate “provocation” set up to blame Moscow.

Leipzig airport is a strategic hub for military and logistics transport and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has called the discovery “a hybrid attack” that spelled “a new level of danger”.

Dobrindt said a “foreign power” may have been involved in the incident that follows a campaign of sabotage, espionage and disinformation that security services blame on Russia.

Russia’s embassy dismissed the entire episode as a “hastily contrived provocation” that “serves only the interests of Kyiv and the militarist wing of the European political establishment”.

The airport in eastern Germany plays a key role in the transport of military goods by the German military forces and NATO allies.

It also serves as a base for Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines.

According to the Bild daily an airport employee saw the drone hovering near the Ukrainian plane and brought it to the ground until police arrived.

Officers then dispatched a bomb disposal robot, while air traffic was halted for several hours. The drone was eventually disarmed.

Prosecutors have said that the drone was equipped with “professional explosives and a detonator” and the only reason it did not explode was that the detonator was defective.

While authorities have not named the type of explosive, unconfirmed media reports have said it was Semtex, a plastic explosive with industrial and military uses.

Semtex has been used by militants and insurgents including the Irish Republican Army. In 1988 it was used to bring down a Pan Am Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in an act blamed on Libyan agents.

Prosecutors say the Leipzig incident was “a serious attack on Germany’s transport and logistics infrastructure” which could have “threatened Germany’s external and internal security”.

The airport shutdown also prompted a cargo plane to abandon its planned landing.

That aircraft was then hit by an unidentified object in mid-air before it landed safely in Hanover, where “minor damage” to the aircraft was discovered.

German police have searched the area near the site of impact for remnants of that object or any other clues, but so far without reporting any discoveries.

Germany is Ukraine’s most important supplier of military equipment in its fight against Russia’s invasion.

While the government has not accused Russia over the latest incident, opposition politicians have pointed fingers at Moscow, with the Greens’ Katharina Droege telling Welt newspaper that it “could be an act of Russian state terrorism”.

The Russian embassy, however, contended in its statement that “the main danger facing Germany today is not the supposed ‘hybrid attacks’ from Moscow, which do not exist”.

The embassy – which said it was alarmed by “a new wave of anti-Russian hysteria in Germany” – said the true danger was “politicians who are enthusiastically developing scenarios for an imminent war with Russia”. AFP