A drone with explosives has been found at Germany’s Leipzig-Halle Airport, and the device has been defused, authorities say, in an incident that the country’s top security official said posed a “new quality of danger”.
Both the runways at the major freight hub were closed and several flights, including one passenger plane, were diverted after a flying object was sighted shortly before midnight on Tuesday (German time).
The second flying object collided with a freight aircraft after it aborted a landing at Leipzig-Halle because the runway was closed, police said. The plane flew to Hanover, about 200 kilometres away, where officials found slight damage.
Police later said an airport employee discovered a drone with “an unknown explosive device” near the airport’s south runway. Photos from the scene showed police technicians with an explosives-detector robot close to a Ukrainian cargo plane.
That the drone was carrying explosives “is a new quality of danger,” German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters, describing the event as “a hybrid attack scenario”. He didn’t offer any assessment or specify who might be responsible.
But Oleksii Makeiev, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, voiced suspicion that Moscow was behind the incident, telling Welt TV: “Who else could it be but Russia?”
AP
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