Chancellor Friedrich Merz convened Germany\u2019s national security council Friday 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.<\/p>\n
While Germany has not blamed anyone for the incident at Leipzig-Halle airport in the early hours of Wednesday, the Russian embassy in Berlin called the discovery a deliberate \u201cprovocation\u201d set up to blame Moscow.<\/p>\n
Leipzig airport is a strategic hub for military and logistics transport and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has called the discovery \u201ca hybrid attack\u201d that spelled \u201ca new level of danger\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dobrindt said a \u201cforeign power\u201d may have been involved in the incident that follows a campaign of sabotage, espionage and disinformation that security services blame on Russia.<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s embassy dismissed the entire episode as a \u201chastily contrived provocation\u201d that \u201cserves only the interests of Kyiv and the militarist wing of the European political establishment\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Antonov Airlines.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Officers then dispatched a bomb disposal robot, while air traffic was halted for several hours. The drone was eventuallt disarmed.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors have said that the drone was equipped with \u201cprofessional explosives and a detonator\u201d and the only reason it did not explode was that the detonator was defective.<\/p>\n
While authorities have not named the type of explosive, unconfirmed media reports have said it was Semtex, a plastic explosive\u00a0with industrial and military\u00a0uses.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in an act blamed on Libyan agents.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors say the Leipzig incident was \u201ca serious attack on Germany\u2019s transport and logistics infrastructure\u201d which could have \u201cthreatened Germany\u2019s external and internal security\u201d.<\/p>\n
The airport shutdown also prompted a cargo plane to abandon its planned landing.<\/p>\n
That aircraft was then hit by an unidentified object in mid-air before it landed safely in Hanover, where \u201cminor damage\u201d to the aircraft was discovered.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Germany is Ukraine\u2019s most important supplier of military equipment in its fight against Russia\u2019s\u00a0invasion.<\/p>\n
While the government has not accused Russia over the latest incident, opposition politicians have pointed fingers at Moscow, with the Greens\u2019 Katharina Droege telling Welt newspaper that it \u201ccould be an act of Russian state terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Russian embassy, however, contended in its statement that \u201cthe main danger facing Germany today is not the supposed \u2018hybrid attacks\u2019 from Moscow, which do not exist\u201d.<\/p>\n
The embassy \u2014 which said it was alarmed by \u201ca new wave of anti-Russian hysteria in Germany\u201d \u2014 said the true danger was \u201cpoliticians who are enthusiastically developing scenarios for an imminent war with Russia\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chancellor Friedrich Merz convened Germany\u2019s national security council Friday to discuss an explosive-laden drone found near a Ukrainian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,355,26489],"class_list":["post-68778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-germany","tag-international","tag-mna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}