Police apprehend 48-year-old suspect following sabotage of power grid
Police have arrested a 48-year-old man from Gevelsberg in the southern Ruhr area. He is suspected of being behind a series of sabotage attacks on the German power grid. He was apprehended near the Weisweiler power plant, located near Aachen, after investigators had been searching for him for several days. Police had conducted a major operation over the weekend in search of the man.
The suspect is accused of using homemade rockets to fire thin wire over high-voltage power lines at several locations in North Rhine-Westphalia, Brandenburg, and Saxony in order to trigger short circuits. The plan succeeded in at least two instances. In Bergheim, west of Cologne, several units of a power plant were out of operation for several days. At the Turnow-Preilack substation in Brandenburg, two short circuits occurred; more than 20 homemade rockets are said to have been used there.
Investigative authorities consider several letters of confession to be authentic and have attributed them to the 48-year-old. In them, the fight against fossil fuels is cited as the justification: "Power generation from fossil fuels is a crime," the letters state. Lignite continues to be mined and used for electricity generation in all three affected federal states. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt referred to it as climate terrorism by a lone perpetrator. On Monday, launching devices and another letter of confession were discovered again near Weisweiler.
So far, the series of attacks has had no noticeable consequences for households: none of the incidents resulted in a large-scale power outage. The 48-year-old has been arrested but not convicted; the presumption of innocence applies until a final verdict is reached. Anyone who notices suspicious objects or damage at high-voltage power lines or substations should under no circumstances touch them and should instead notify the police by calling 110.