A German man has been arrested after a spate of attacks with what have been described as home-made rockets against electrical infrastructure near coal-fired power plants.
A days-long manhunt concluded on Tuesday with the arrest at a police checkpoint near a power station of 48-year-old ‘Daniel V’ — his full name not having been published in accordance with German privacy laws for criminal suspects — over a series of what have been called “climate terrorism” attacks against the national power network.
The man was arrested after trying to avoid a police checkpoint near the Weisweiler coal power station. He offered no resistance to officers but was wearing a backpack containing explosives. A concealed tent was subsequently discovered nearby which was “rigged” with explosives.
Attacks took place at at least half a dozen high voltage power sites across three German states, and police are seeking to discover other hitherto undetected attempts to sabotage the power grid.
German broadcaster NTV states the remarkable means of attack allegedly devised by the suspect is to use home-made rockets to carry a lightweight wire from the ground and over high-voltage power lines. Once the rocket falls to the ground, this wire would be slung over the power lines, grounding the equipment and potentially causing a catastrophic failure. Bright flashes of blue-white light were observed at the sites of some attacks as the high voltage electricity arced to the ground.
The locations chosen for these assaults — directly next to brown coal (lignite)-fired power stations — appears to have been chosen to cause the power stations themselves to ‘trip’ and shut down. In one such attack, more than 20 rockets are said to have been fired at a substation Turnow-Preilack substation near the Jänschwalde power plant in Brandenburg, causing two short circuits, but no local grid failure.
Dutch broadcaster NOS reports there was a “brief interruption” in power supply after a large-scale outage at another unspecified coal-fired power plant over the past week linked to these attacks, and part of the Bergheim power plant west of Cologne was knocked out “for several days” after another high voltage shorting attack with rockets.
The manhunt for Daniel V commenced last week amid the spate of attacks after several German newspapers received handwritten letters of confession containing a political manifesto, stating the sabotage was being launched because “generating electricity from fossil fuels is a crime” and because of alleged German complicity in “the genocide in Palestine”. The letters are reported to have not disguised the identity of the author, contained details of the attacks that were not yet in the public domain, and a raid on the author’s home last week in the course of the hunt also discovered home-made explosives.
In what is a comparatively rare admission of the existence of left-wing terrorism — with European political and security figures generally more publicly preoccupied with Islamist and right-wing terrorism — German Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt stated the attacks were clearly a case of “climate terrorism”. He gave left-wing radicals the benefit of the doubt, however, adding that it could simply be a false-flag by Russia to sow discord.
The substation attacks of the past week follow years of an increasingly intense campaign of infrastructure sabotage by the hard left in Europe. Previous attacks have shown a relative sophistication in understanding of where to strike to cause maximum disruption, leading to speculation in the past that those involved may be former employees of power or railway companies. Yet this sophisticated planning has not until now been matched by any level of technical complexity, with simple arson or cable-cutting serving the saboteurs well.
Previous attacks include massive power outages that saw Berlin plunged into darkness for days at a time on two occasions. Hard left climate extremists claimed the sabotage, which saw high voltage power lines set on fire, causing the largest power outage in the cite since the Second World War. Summarising this history and paraphrasing previous reports:
50,000 homes were left without power in September 2025 after a hard-left group said it had burnt out a key power line, overwhelming backup systems as the cut lasted so long battery packs and generators became exhausted. Trams were left stranded on the roads, blocking major junctions and even basic systems like the emergency telephone numbers for the police and other emergency services ceased to function.
Local media said the attack was by “left-wing extremist attack with insider knowledge” on where exactly to set fires to cause maximum disruption.
Left-wing group “Some Anarchists” said ending the use of electricity altogether was their ultimate aim and that without it life would be full of “freedom without domination and exploitation. They stated: “Electricity is the primary source of energy that powers every machine and the ‘progress’ necessary to reproduce this current system”. The group was thought to be behind “dozens” of other such attacks.
The month before that , German railways experienced days of “massive” disruption as a ultra-anarchist set fire to cables rending a major line carrying intercity and international trains unusable.
As the first set of cable damage was repaired, a second fire was discovered nearby, again knocking the line out. Regional interior minister Herbert Reul said at a press conference: “Based on our authorities’ current assessment and understanding of this act of sabotage, it was left-wing extremists who are trying to bomb us back to pre-industrial times”.
A group calling themselves ‘Kommando’ claimed responsibility for the sabotage, and wrote in their manifesto:
The society we live in is in the process of devouring the entire planet. The mass conversion of natural ecosystems into dead products… [is] a core mechanism of the system… None of the proposed pseudo-solutions is capable of changing this problem. Not so-called renewable energies, nor communism, nor so-called green consumerism, nor any spiritual ‘transformations.’
The only solution is the complete dismantling of the technological-industrial system. We consider attacks on transportation, communications, and energy infrastructure, along with other forms of resistance, to be essential in this fight.
As reported by Breitbart News in 2022 there was another strikingly similar attack where “Backhaul communications cables concerned with the Germany Railway (Deutsche Bahn, DB) radio system, safety-critical equipment without which modern, tightly timetabled and high speed trains cannot safely operate, were “willfully and intentionally severed”.”
The perpetrators were said to have “very precise knowledge of the railway’s radio system” and two cables were cut simultaneously 340 miles apart. As expressed by a German Army General at the time of that attack, the purpose of such attacks are “not about an enemy army with soldiers and tanks attacking our country [but] pinpricks in the population that are intended to stir up uncertainty and shake confidence in our state” and “every substation, every power plant, every pipeline can be attacked”.
These “pinprick attacks” undermining public confidence in the everyday systems of Western life frequently target railways. Railway traffic was paralysed across France on the opening day of the Paris 2024 Olympics when suspected “ultra-left” activists who were said to have been “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted”.
The following day, France was hit with a double-whammy when internet backbone cable networks were sabotaged in six locations nationwide simultaneously.
Cables supplying power to high-speed trains were sabotaged in in 2019 in Italy. As stated at the time, this attack appeared to coincide with a court ruling on a left-wing group said to have bombed a book shop.
In 2019, a radio transmitter was burnt in France. In 2020, 50,000 people lost internet access in greater Paris when cables were cut. This was said to be the culmination of a weeks-long campaign against information infrastructure.
In 2021, a series of attacks against telephone and internet services in France saw data company vehicles burnt, fibre optic cables cut, and a radio tower destroyed. Left-wingers took credit, saying: “it is not to protest against 5G in particular but in a broader context, fighting against the techno-world… We want to salute all the arsonists who are acting in the shadows at the moment and repeatedly beating this technological hell.”
In early 2022, the far-left was suspected over the sabotage of a power station and nine power lines over two nights. This left thousands of homes and a semiconductor factory without power. Days later, several French cities were left totally without internet after data cables in several locations were cut in the same night. The sabotage was done effectively enough, it was said the attackers would have to have “known the network”.