Major police operation in Hambach Forest: police search for power grid saboteur from Gevelsberg
With up to 100 vehicles, police searched the Hambach Forest for a 48-year-old suspect. The man is believed to be behind sabotage attacks on the German power grid.
Police comb through Hambach Forest searching for suspected power grid saboteur
With a large contingent of up to 100 vehicles, police searched the Hambach Forest west of Cologne for a 48-year-old suspect believed to be behind a series of sabotage attacks against the German power grid. The aim of the operation was to find the wanted man himself or traces pointing to him, confirmed a spokesman for Cologne police to news agency dpa. According to DER SPIEGEL (Justice & Crime), the search was still ongoing in the afternoon.
The manhunt has been underway for several days. On Saturday, investigators issued a public wanted notice with two photographs of the suspect, who is from Gevelsberg in the southern Ruhr area. A bicycle is now also being sought, which he may have used as a means of transport.
The Hambach Forest is a woodland area between Cologne and Aachen that has served for years as a symbol in the dispute over energy transition and lignite mining. Since 2012, activists have erected treehouses there under the motto "Hambi bleibt". According to Cologne police, some of these still exist and were also included in the search. Whether the treehouses are currently inhabited was initially unclear.
The attempted sabotage attacks targeted power lines in North Rhine-Westphalia, Brandenburg and most recently Saxony — all federal states where lignite is still mined and converted to electricity. On Friday, officers found explosives in the suspect's apartment in Gevelsberg. Shortly afterwards, a specialised operations unit stormed a truck converted into a motorhome in Niederzier at the Hambach open-pit mine — the wanted man was not present.
The background to the investigation involves two claiming letters that are in possession of SPIEGEL. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) declared on this: "The knowledge that is revealed in these letters is unambiguous perpetrator knowledge." Dobrindt cited "climate terrorism" by a lone perpetrator as the suspected motive. One of the letters states: "Power generation from fossil fuels is a crime."
In the incidents in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, the perpetrators used, among other things, homemade rockets and launching devices. In East Saxony, police also discovered twelve explosive devices on high-voltage power lines. The authorities are currently examining whether there is a connection between the acts in the various regions.