On the night of Aug. 4, an employee at Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany found a drone carrying an explosive device inside the secured cargo area, beside the southern runway. It was sitting next to an Antonov Airlines cargo aircraft — the Ukrainian carrier that flies military supplies. Federal police brought in a bomb-disposal robot and removed the detonator. Flight operations stopped completely, and investigators believe a second drone then struck a DHL cargo plane that was going around because the runway had been closed.
Ten days later, according to the public broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a third drone was found west of the airport, carrying roughly 50 grams of a substance investigators suspected to be hexogen — a military explosive. The prosecutor general’s office declined to comment on that report. Saxony’s counterterrorism police and the state prosecutor’s extremism unit have the case, and classify the airport as critical infrastructure.
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