FRANKFURT, Aug 6 (Reuters) – A Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked near an explosive-laden drone found at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle airport on Tuesday night was carrying a payload of military ammunition, a group of news outlets including Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on Thursday.
Forensic experts found that the explosives attached to the drone were of a high military grade, reported the outlets, which also included broadcasters NDR and WDR, citing a confidential police report.
Newspaper Bild, meanwhile, cited unnamed investigators as saying that a technical defect prevented the drone-mounted device from exploding.
Those findings potentially raise the stakes in a widening counterterrorism investigation of the incident at an airport serving as a major cargo and NATO military logistics hub that the German government has designated as critical infrastructure.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said late on Wednesday that the drone incident constituted a hybrid attack and signaled an elevated level of danger.
Dobrindt is due to host his counterparts from the Baltic states, Poland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, among other nations, for a special summit on anti-drone defence in the northern German town of Flensburg at the end of August.
Police in the state of Saxony, where Leipzig/Halle is located, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the media reports of the aircraft’s payload. The state’s public prosecutors’ office could not immediately be reached for comment.
German authorities, meanwhile, said on Thursday they were continuing the search for debris from an unidentified object that damaged another freight jet mid-air near the airport on the same night.
INCIDENTS DISRUPT ONE OF GERMANY’S MAIN LOGISTICS HUBS The drone was found close to several Ukrainian Antonov An-124 cargo airplanes, among the world’s biggest freighters, according to earlier media reports. A Reuters journalist saw police collecting evidence in the vicinity of one of the planes early on Wednesday.
Leipzig/Halle is the main base for NATO’s Strategic Airlift International Solution, known as SALIS, which is helping to deliver equipment to strengthen the defence pact’s eastern flank using a small fleet of Antonov cargo planes.
The cargo jet that struck the unidentified object, meanwhile, had been performing a go-around due to the closure of one of the airport’s runways. It was lightly damaged in the collision and eventually landed in Hanover in northern Germany. Flights were suspended and several aircraft, including some operated by German logistics group DHL, were diverted late on Tuesday. A spokesperson for Leipzig/Halle airport, which is also used by companies like Lufthansa Cargo and Amazon.com, said on Thursday that operations were back to normal and no additional security measures had been implemented.
While German authorities have said the perpetrators of the incidents at the airport had not yet been identified, Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker and a member of the parliamentary intelligence committee, blamed Russia.
The Russian Embassy in Berlin did not respond to an emailed request for comment from Reuters.
(Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Friederike Heine; Additional reporting by Axel Schmidt;Editing by Miranda Murray and Joe Bavier)
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