German authorities said a cache of weapons and ammunition was discovered in a forest near Berlin last year. As reported by leading German media, intelligence services believe that these weapons were to be used for contract killings ordered by Russia.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said at a press conference that in October last year, domestic intelligence received information about a weapons cache on the outskirts of Berlin.
Special service officers, together with the police, established the location of the cache and found two pistols and a supply of ammunition in it.
The weapon was rendered inoperative, Dobrindt said.
The intelligence services monitored the cache for several months, but no one came to it.
“This case demonstrates that we have to work in conditions of a high level of threat,” the minister said.
The German Interior Minister said prosecutors are looking into the possible involvement of a man who was detained in Romania on suspicion of planning attacks using explosive devices in parcels.
Dobrindt did not specify the suspect's nationality but described him as a "low-level agent" who did not know all of his superiors. He added that several such potential perpetrators have already been detained this year, including a citizen of Kazakhstan.
An AFP source in the Romanian police said that one of two Ukrainian citizens who were arrested in Romania last October on charges of organizing attacks ordered by Russia is suspected of involvement in the Berlin weapons cache.
At the time, Romanian police said two Ukrainians aged between 20 and 30 arrived in Bucharest from Poland and “handed over two parcels containing homemade devices to the office of an international courier company.” “Their goal was to destroy this building by arson,” the police press release said.
Romanian foreign intelligence said that these Ukrainian citizens were connected “with a wide sabotage network directed against European countries and controlled by Russian special services.”
The Romanian authorities claimed that they “prevented a new sabotage operation that the Russian Federation organized on Romanian territory.”
As reported by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and television companies NDR and WDR, citing sources in the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), this intelligence service believes that the cache of weapons belonged to Russian intelligence.
“German security services are convinced that the weapons were intended for agents who, on behalf of Moscow, were to carry out so-called “kinetic operations” in the country, in other words, murders,” the publications said.
Journalists recall that the head of the BfV, Senan Selen, has long “warned at secret meetings in Berlin that the Russian special services have intensified their tactics and are now planning contract killings in Germany.”
“Moscow’s target list reportedly includes defense industry executives, exiled opposition figures, and various Ukrainian supporters,” the publication’s authors note.
The Russian Embassy in Germany did not respond to requests from journalists to comment on these allegations.
At a news conference Friday, Dobrindt declined to confirm reports that the weapons cache was linked to Russia, but said he could not rule out “foreign involvement.”
As BBC Germany correspondent Bethany Bell reminds, German authorities suspect Russia of organizing a series of attacks in the country.
In 2024, CNN reported that Moscow was planning to assassinate the head of the largest German defense concern Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger. German politicians were shocked and demanded decisive action from the authorities.
In 2021, a court in Germany sentenced Russian citizen and FSB special forces soldier Vadim Krasikov to life imprisonment for the murder of former Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park.
