Search for suspected saboteur in Hambach Forest ended unsuccessfully

Kerpen. The search for a suspect for attempted sabotage attacks on the German power grid has so far been unsuccessful despite a large-scale operation in the Hambacher Forest near Cologne. The search was ended around 7 p.m., as a spokesman for the Cologne police told the German Press Agency. No clues were found. According to a dpa reporter, up to 100 police vehicles were on site.

According to a spokesman for the Cologne police, the aim of the operation was to find the 48-year-old man himself or to find traces that would provide clues to him.

The general search for the perpetrator is now continuing. The police also came across an inhabited tree house in the forest. Special forces would have been needed to search it, but they were not immediately available, as the police spokesman said. However, the police are keeping an eye on the situation on site.

The suspect has been searched for days because of the sabotage act. The investigators published a search call on Saturday with two photos of the suspect from Gevelsberg in the southern Ruhr area. Meanwhile, a search is also underway for a bicycle that he may have used.

The Hambacher Forest is a forest area between Cologne and Aachen that has become a nationwide symbol for the fight for the energy transition and against brown coal-fired power generation. The forest lies on the edge of the Hambach open-cast brown coal mine and was originally intended to make way for the ongoing open-cast mining.

Since 2012, environmentalists and activists have been building tree houses in the forest under the motto “Hambi remains” in order to prevent clearing for climate-damaging lignite-fired power generation and to protect it from the advancing brown coal open-cast mining. According to the Cologne police, there are still tree houses today, which are also part of the search. It is not yet known whether any of them are still inhabited.

In autumn 2018, the CDU-led state government had the Hambacher Forest cleared in one of the largest police operations in the history of North Rhine-Westphalia with reference to fire protection.

After a long legal dispute, the forest was finally saved through political agreement: in the coal compromise between the federal government, states and energy companies, it was decided at the beginning of 2020 that the Hambach Forest should be preserved. Since then, the demolition edge of the opencast mine ends just before the edge of the forest. In June 2026, another important decision was made: the Hambach Forest is to become a virgin forest and will be placed under permanent protection.

The attempted acts of sabotage were concentrated in North Rhine-Westphalia, Brandenburg and most recently Saxony. Brown coal is still mined and converted into electricity in all three federal states. On Friday, officers found explosives in the suspect's Gevelsberg apartment. Later, a special operations team stormed a truck at the Hambach opencast mine in Niederzier that had apparently been converted into a mobile home. But the person they were looking for was not found.

The background to the search is two letters of confession that were received by several media companies and are also available to the German Press Agency. “The knowledge that is revealed in these letters is clear perpetrator knowledge,” said Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU).

Regarding the motive, Dobrindt said it was most likely “climate terrorism” by a lone perpetrator. A letter of responsibility states: “Generating electricity from fossil fuels is a crime.”

North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) said that anyone who endangers the power supply to hospitals in the name of climate protection is not saving anything but endangering lives. “No ideology is a good excuse,” emphasized Reul.

What is striking is that the affected locations are close to areas where brown coal is still being mined. According to the industry association Debriv, there is active opencast mining in Germany in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the south of Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt as well as in the east and west of Saxony.

After the incidents in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, in which saboteurs used, among other things, self-made rockets and launchers, the police also discovered twelve explosive devices on high-voltage lines in East Saxony.

Despite the temporary shutdown of several brown coal power plant blocks in North Rhine-Westphalia, the general power supply was secured at all times, according to the operators. The authorities are currently investigating a connection between the individual crimes in the different regions.

In view of the recent attacks, Baden-Württemberg's Prime Minister Cem Özdemir questioned the protection of security-relevant infrastructure against sabotage and called for more speed. The states need to significantly increase the protection of their energy systems, the Green politician told the Editorial Network Germany (RND).

"We are vulnerable. Our opponents know that," said Özdemir. Attacks on particularly sensitive points could be aimed at unsettling the population. The state should not allow itself to be paralyzed by this, but it must take the dangers seriously. The Green politician mentioned surveillance cameras and additional fencing as possible protective measures. “All of this must now be done at full speed,” he said.