The search for Daniel V. for sabotage of the power grid continues

The search for Daniel V., who is strongly suspected of several sabotage attacks on the power grid, continued at full speed on Monday. According to information from the F.A.Z. After evaluating evidence, V. is now suspected of planning further attacks near Düsseldorf, on the Lower Rhine and at a facility on the Dutch side.

The investigators believe it is likely that V. had been traveling in Germany for months scouting out possible crime scenes and meticulously preparing his attacks. On Monday there was a major police operation in the Remscheid-Wuppertal area near a substation. According to police, a suspicious person with a backpack was reported at a substation there. It is unclear whether this is Daniel V.

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The 48-year-old man from Gevelsberg in the Ennepe-Ruhr district wrote two letters of confession to several media outlets (including the F.A.Z.) last week. It said that at several substations in the Saxony-Brandenburg lignite mining area and in the Rhenish lignite mining area, he shot wires over high-voltage lines using self-constructed launching devices. Regarding his motive, he wrote: “Generating electricity from fossil fuels is a crime.”

The investigators believed they were already on the trail

While the attacks failed in most cases or had no major impact, after the attack on a substation in Bergheim, several power plant blocks in the Rhenish district were temporarily taken offline. Thanks to the quick response of the responsible engineers, there was no power outage here either.

At the end of last week, the investigators thought they were close on Daniel V.'s trail because he had stated his name and his registered address in his two letters of confession, which experts classified as authentic. However, special police forces did not find him there on Friday. According to relatives, V. has not been in Gevelsberg for a long time and has suffered from psychological problems. Also on Friday, investigators found the suspected perpetrator's vehicle near the Hambach open-cast brown coal mine in the Rhenish mining area.

According to information from the F.A.Z., forensics were able to locate the abandoned truck. Late on Friday afternoon, they secured numerous pieces of evidence such as pyrotechnics and a notepad with plans for further attacks and possible targets. The recordings are said to show that the suspect also considered, among other things, a facility in Doetinchem, the Netherlands, near the border with Germany, as a location for the attack.

The suspect is said not to have been part of the Hambi scene

A large contingent of police roamed the Hambach Forest again on Sunday. In 2018, the area of ​​forest directly on the demolition edge of the opencast mine of the same name became a nationwide symbol of the struggle for the forced phase-out of coal through a large demonstration. Although it has been clear for years that the forest will definitely not be dredged up and that Germany wants to end coal-fired power generation by 2038 at the latest, several so-called climate activists still live, at least temporarily, in self-made huts and tree houses.

However, the assumption that Daniel V. could be staying there was not initially confirmed. There is also no evidence to date that V. was part of the violent left-wing extremist climate protection scene. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) said on Friday that it was most likely “climate terrorism” by a lone perpetrator.