By Holger Hansen
FRANKFURT, Aug 6 (Reuters) – A senior German lawmaker said on Thursday that aircraft parked near where an explosives-laden drone was discovered at an airport this week were not loaded with military material, denying media reports that one of them was carrying ammunition.
Newspaper the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, together with public television broadcasters NDR and WDR, had cited a confidential police report as saying a Ukrainian cargo aircraft near the drone was transporting a payload of military ammunition.
They also reported that forensic experts had found that the explosives attached to the drone were of a high military grade.
Detlef Seif, a lawmaker from the governing conservatives and member of the parliamentary interior committee, told Reuters that, without exception, information he had received indicated “the planes were not loaded with ammunition or weapons”.
Airport workers discovered the drone late on Tuesday at Leipzig/Halle Airport, an important cargo and NATO logistics hub in eastern Germany.
The newspaper Bild cited unnamed investigators as saying that a technical defect prevented the drone-mounted device from exploding.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt described the incident as a hybrid attack, and German authorities have launched a counterterrorism investigation.
Police in the state of Saxony, where Leipzig/Halle is located, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the media reports about the aircraft’s payload. The state’s public prosecutors’ office could not immediately be reached for comment.
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, among other things, helping to deliver equipment to strengthen the defence pact’s eastern flank using a small fleet of Antonov cargo planes.
German authorities were also searching on Thursday for debris from an unidentified object that damaged a freight jet mid-air near the airport on the same night.
That cargo plane struck the unidentified object as it was performing a go-around due to the closure of one of Leipzig/Halle’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 former 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 Holger Hansen, Ludwig Burger and Friederike Heine; Additional reporting by Axel Schmidt; Editing by Miranda Murray and Joe Bavier)
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