FRANKFURT, Germany —
German police were on Sunday probing an act of
“sabotage” on the country’s rail infrastructure, with some officials pointing
the finger at Russia in the wake of the Nord Stream pipeline explosions.
اضافة اعلان
Important communications cables were cut at two
sites on Saturday, forcing rail services in the north to be halted for three
hours and causing travel chaos for thousands of passengers.
Rail operator
Deutsche Bahn blamed the travel
disruptions on “sabotage”, while Transport Minister Volker Wissing spoke of “a
targeted and deliberate action”.
Germany’s top-selling daily (Bild) cited an internal
document from the Federal Criminal Police Office (
BKA) as saying, in an early
analysis of the incident, that an act of “state-ordered sabotage would be
conceivable”.
The document pointed to the “widely separated crime
scenes” where the cables were severed, in Herne in the western state of North
Rhine-Westphalia and in Berlin in the east, some 540km away.
The BKA also noted that the incident comes not long
after last month’s undersea blasts on
Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines between
Germany and Russia.
The pipeline sabotage further raised tensions
between Russia and the West, already sky-high over the Ukraine war, but Moscow
denies any involvement in the blasts.
Anton Hofreiter, a Green party lawmaker and chairman
of the German parliament’s European affairs committee, said Russia could have
been behind the train disruptions.
“To pull this off, you have to have very precise
knowledge of the railway’s radio system. The question is whether we are dealing
with sabotage by foreign powers,” Hofreiter told the Funke newspaper group.
Given that the Nord Stream leaks “pointed to the
Kremlin”, “we can’t rule out that Russia could also be behind the attack on the
rail services,” he said.
“Maybe both are warning shots because we support
Ukraine.”
Police have said
the investigation into Saturday’s incident is still wide open and they have not
publicly mentioned any suspects. According to local media, authorities are also
looking into whether far-left extremists could be to blame.
‘Hybrid threats’
With concern growing about
the vulnerability of Germany’s critical infrastructure, Hofreiter called for 20
billion euros to be invested in the coming years to boost security, including
cyber security.
A senior German military official warned that
further attacks were possible.
“Every power station, every energy transport pipe is
a potential target,” Major General Carsten Breuer told Bild, speaking of
growing “hybrid threats”.
Germany’s
conservative opposition CDU party also called for closer monitoring of key
infrastructure.
“We must rethink the security architecture of Germany and
the EU,” senior CDU lawmaker Thorsten Frei told the RND media group. “The
modern age of hybrid warfare requires us to adapt,” he said.
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