Red alert at Hamburg Airport! A man drove his car through a barrier onto the apron on Saturday evening and is taking his daughter (4) hostage. The car is parked right next to a passenger plane; the 35-year-old wants to be flown to Turkey with the child. The police have been negotiating with the father all night and reported at 6.40am: “The situation is still static”, i.e. unchanged. The airport has been closed since then and the first Sunday flights have been cancelled.
At 8.12 p.m., the armed man was discovered by security forces at “Hamburg Airport Helmut Schmidt”. According to the information in the newspaper BILD, he was speeding outside Terminal 1 in an Audi without a licence plate. He initially sped off, but a few minutes later broke through the north gate with the car. He drove straight to the aeroplanes on the apron and stopped next to a Turkish Airlines passenger plane.
Police spokeswoman Sandra Levgrün told BILD: “This aircraft was carrying passengers, but has since been evacuated and cleared.”
The police negotiated with the man all night (in Turkish). He has his daughter (4) in the car and, according to BILD, wants to take her on a plane to Turkey. The background is apparently a custody dispute.
The state of play at 6.40 a.m.: Negotiations are still ongoing, the airport will remain closed until further notice …
Hamburg Airport wrote on X (formerly Twitter) early on Sunday morning that cancellations and delays were to be expected throughout the day.
The man is said to have set several fires in the airport area during the night! He threw two blazing bottles out of the car, “a kind of Molotov cocktail”, said Thomas Gerbert, spokesman for the federal police. The fire brigade sprayed the aircraft with water for safety. Their fear: the Audi driver could set fire to the plane again.
According to BILD, the man also fired several times from his car. No damage was caused and the airport fire brigade was also able to extinguish the bottles filled with fuel.
Shortly before the gunman was noticed by security staff at the airport, the wife alerted the police. She warned the officers by emergency call that her husband was racing to the airport – with the child.
Apparently it was a custody dispute that escalated! The perpetrator is said to have taken the child away from the mother on Saturday evening and sped off with him. The man is said to be a Turkish man (35) from Lower Saxony.
Air traffic in Hamburg was completely cancelled in the evening. All access to the terminals was closed. 3,200 passengers from the buildings and aircraft had to be evacuated to a place of safety.
An airport spokeswoman told BILD this evening: “Due to a police operation, flight operations at Hamburg Airport have been suspended since 8.24 pm and will not be resumed today. This affects 27 flight movements (6 departures and 21 landings).”
During the night, the police announced that the airport would remain closed and could not be reached by suburban railway – access was prohibited. Hamburg Airport also announced that the first flights scheduled for Sunday morning had also been cancelled. It was later announced that flight operations had been “suspended indefinitely”.
Schüsse am Hamburger Flughafen: Mann hält sein Kind (4) als Geisel | Regional | BILD.de