Behind the train chaos on Saturday is sabotage, the police and Deutsche Bahn are sure. Hardly anything is known about the background so far, the Berlin State Criminal Police Office is now conducting the investigation. Green leader Nouripour sees problems in protecting critical infrastructure.
Nothing worked on the rails in the north for hours on Saturday. The reason: unknown persons had destroyed important communication cables. Now the police are looking for the perpetrators. The investigations would be carried out in all directions, the federal police said. In the evening, the investigations were then handed over to the State Criminal Police Office in Berlin. “We have a crime scene in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen,” said a spokesman for the Federal Police Directorate in Berlin. “Another is in North Rhine-Westphalia.”
Security circles said that fiber optic cables were deliberately damaged at the Karower Kreuz in Berlin and in Herne in North Rhine-Westphalia. The backup system also failed. “Currently, a targeted external influence on the cable of the Deutsche Bahn can be assumed,” said the spokesman. For reasons of investigation tactics, he could not provide any information on further details. Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing had previously said that the disturbances were due to sabotage at two locations. “Cables that are essential for train traffic were willfully and deliberately severed.” The train had become the target of an attack.
Green leader Omid Nouripour called for improvements in the protection of critical infrastructure in view of the fact. “Today’s attack on the cable connections of the railways has caused chaos at the stations, delays in the supply chains and massive uncertainty among the population,” said Nouripour. The critical infrastructures and thus all of us are vulnerable.
The sabotage affected long-distance and, to some extent, regional Deutsche Bahn services in large parts of northern Germany. Countless passengers were stranded at the major train stations such as Hanover, Hamburg and Berlin. Long queues formed at information desks.
In the course of the morning, the railway reported that the disruption had been rectified, but that there could still be impairments. “Unfortunately, you still have to expect train and stop cancellations and delays,” tweeted the railway on Saturday afternoon. International connections were also affected. So no IC trains ran between Berlin and Amsterdam. IC trains from Copenhagen terminated at the Danish-German border in Padborg. There was also a standstill in some regional trains – such as RE and RB connections in Lower Saxony, Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein, as the railway announced. As an alternative, the company suggested travelers between Berlin and Cologne and between Berlin and Baden-Württemberg and Switzerland to use long-distance connections with a change in Erfurt and Frankfurt am Main. “Please understand that the trains that are still running sometimes have a very high number of passengers,” it said.
Many travelers who wanted to travel from Berlin to North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, followed the train’s recommendation and took the detour with a change in Frankfurt. The result was completely overcrowded trains, as a dpa reporter from the ICE 934 reported on the journey to Frankfurt. “No getting through in the aisles because everything is blocked with passengers sitting or standing there,” he said.
