Traffic at Hamburg Airport in northern Germany was disrupted on Saturday evening (November 4) due to a large police operation linked to the alleged kidnapping of a child in a dispute over his custody.
Around 8 p.m., an armed man drove a car through an airport gate and onto the tarmac, firing twice into the air and throwing two burning bottles out of the cabin, a door said -police word. At least two people, including a child, were in the vehicle, according to police.
Earlier, the wife of the driver of the car had alerted the police about the kidnapping of her child, he added. In the evening, the police said they believed that a “child custody dispute was at the origin of this operation.”
Psychologists on site
“We are on site with a large contingent of emergency services. We are currently favoring a static hostage [taking] situation,” the Hamburg police said on their X account (ex-Twitter). “We are in the process of evacuating all aircraft at Hamburg Airport that still have passengers on them. The terminals have already been evacuated,” police added.
Psychologists as well as agents specializing in negotiations are on site, police said, adding as of 2 a.m. they were still in contact with the individual in the vehicle.
At the same time, the airport published a message on its website announcing that no landing or takeoff was possible due to police intervention. In total, “twenty-seven air movements – six departures and twenty-one landings – with around 3,200 passengers are affected,” an airport spokesperson told the German newspaper Bild.