Paranoia is growing in Germany as a new alert is added to the long list of Suspicions of sabotage of military bases across the country in the space of a few days. This Friday, August 16, it is a military barracks located in the municipality of Mechernich (near Bonn), housing nearly 10,000 people, which is concerned, according to the BBC. The authorities initially suspected deliberate contamination of the drinking water of the barracks, following an intrusion on the local treatment and distribution site, which supplies the military site, among other things. This intrusion was spotted by an army patrol, after controls around Cologne were recently reinforced. The alert was finally lifted at the end of the day after initial checks: “The suspected contamination of the drinking water is almost excluded, but we will know for sure only after the weekend,” announced the municipality of Mechernich at the end of the day on Friday.
The German authorities’ reactivity is understandable given that this is not the first suspicion of sabotage targeting the area in recent days. “We reacted quickly in two places, closed access, reinforced controls, alerted investigators and ordered laboratory analyses” on possible contamination of the sites, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius had already declared earlier in the week. On Wednesday, August 14, the authorities had discovered in Cologne a hole in a fence surrounding another drinking water station, this time supplying the Cogne-Wahn Air Force site, located near Cologne Bonn airport and home to more than 5,000 soldiers and civilians, reported the german newspaper The Mirror“As the drinking water system showed unusual values, the drinking water supply to the barracks was cut off,” the base spokesman said. to the European media Politico. After receiving the final results of the laboratory analyses on Friday, the army was reassuring, indicating that “no exceedances of the limit values had been observed”. “The water can be used again,” it said in a statement.
Fear of Russian sabotage
The Cologne-Wahn base alone is home to the highest echelons of the German air force as well as planes used by government ministers for foreign travel, and is considered essential to German military support for Ukraine. NATO has also reported an attempted intrusion into its Geilenkirchen air base (80 kilometres from Cologne, near the Dutch border), where its AWACS reconnaissance planes are based, and is now carrying out checks on the water supply at the site.
Incidents taken particularly seriously. While the extent of the contaminations is not yet known, the army has been placed on alert in the context of the Russian war in Ukraine. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned this week of an increased danger of Russian sabotage in Germany. “The threats against which we must protect ourselves range from espionage, sabotage and cyberattacks to state terrorism,” she told the newspaper on Monday. Handelsblattexplaining that the Ukrainian advance on Russian territory could exacerbate the threat, while German Marder tanks are apparently being used by Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region. The chairman of the Defense Committee of the German Chamber of Deputies, Marcus Faber, has very clearly pointed the finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin as a possible instigator of these two alleged sabotage attempts, in the pages of the German daily Image “One can imagine that a leading actor would want to show his sabotage capabilities. The one who has the greatest interest in this is Putin.”