Suspect in German power grid attacks arrested: Reports

Police have arrested a man in western Germany in connection with a week of sabotage attempts on electricity substations, local media reported on Tuesday.

Der Spiegel said that the man, identified as Daniel V., 48, was arrested at a traffic stop near Weisweiler, close to the city of Aachen in northwestern Germany.

Investigators had been hunting him for days after homemade devices were used against substations that serve brown coal power plants.

On Monday evening, police found several of those homemade launch devices near the Weisweiler power plant — the same type used in earlier sabotage attempts. The devices were built to fire thin wire over high-voltage lines and trigger short circuits.

Similar ramps appeared last week in the states of Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saxony. The first confirmed attacks came on Sept. 1 at substations serving the Jaenschwalde lignite plant in eastern Germany and facilities near Bergheim, west of Cologne.

Letters claiming responsibility reached German media last week. They were signed with the suspect’s full name. The writer said he acted alone and that left-wing groups and activists “had nothing to do with it.”

“Electricity generation from fossil fuels is a crime that brings unspeakable suffering,” one letter said. “Because the media don’t do a damn thing to convey the urgency of the situation and the state does not intervene to avert this suffering, I have to do it now.”

In another passage, he wrote: “I am not attacking the country but the fossil fuel industry, even if for some politicians that is the same thing.” He said he was “pleased that there were no power outages and yet coal-fired power plant units went offline.”

He also wrote that he would “not be sad” if Germany’s arms industry were hit by outages, “particularly as long as Germany supports the genocide in Palestine.”