Berlin plans a cyberdome and city drone units after the Leipzig airport attack

Germany is preparing a national package against drones, cyber intrusion and sabotage after the failed attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport on the night of 4 to 5 August, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told Bild am Sonntag on Sunday. The plan would put mobile Federal Police counter-drone units in nine cities, give operators of power plants and defence factories the legal right to bring down unauthorised aircraft, and build a distributed sensor net that officials are calling a cyberdome.

"These attacks will increase, but we can defend and protect ourselves," Dobrindt said. On 1 September he had already told a Berlin news conference that investigators, operational patterns and intelligence findings together proved Russian state responsibility for the Leipzig attempt. Moscow denies the charge. The foreign ministry in Moscow has called the German case "anti-Russian action" and said it will respond.

The airport incident is the event the package is built around. A small quadcopter carrying an explosive charge reached the secured cargo apron at Leipzig/Halle and sat near parked Antonov An-124 freighters for more than four hours before anyone treated it as a threat. Camera footage later showed the drone in the cargo area around 7:30 p.m. Flight operations stopped at about 11:40 p.m. An airport bus driver, not a defensive system, brought the aircraft down between the freighters at 11:42 p.m. A federal police robot removed the detonator after midnight. The north runway reopened at 1:55 a.m. The south runway stayed closed as a crime scene.

Investigators later said the drone struck a wing of a Ukrainian cargo aircraft whose fuel tanks sit in that wing. A second flying object hit an inbound freighter, which diverted to Hanover. A third explosive-laden drone was found in a nearby field. The federal prosecutor took the case on 6 August as an attack on transport infrastructure capable of endangering national security. No suspect has been named in public. A US defence official in Europe told CNN the device carried military-grade explosives.

Dobrindt raised Germany's threat assessment from "general" to "high" on 1 September and said the country is not at war but is a daily target of hybrid operations. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul ordered the Russian consulate in Bonn closed, along with the Russian House cultural centre in Berlin.

The Sunday package goes further into hardware and law. Rapid-reaction teams with specialised vehicles and helicopters would be based in Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Leipzig, Hanover and Cologne. Their brief would cover airports, main railway stations and the government quarter in Berlin. Companies that run water, electricity and arms plants would no longer have to wait for police before they could disable a drone over their own ground. The cyberdome would be a network of digital sensors meant to catch coordinated hacking against the same class of targets.

Bild am Sonntag cited the interior ministry as the source of the detail. The measures still need legislation and money. They also sit next to a separate German effort to squeeze the Baltic "shadow fleet" that moves Russian oil. The political timing is blunt. Saxony-Anhalt voted on Sunday with security and migration at the centre of the campaign. Leipzig/Halle sits in Saxony, one state over. The argument Dobrindt is making is that the airport night was not a one-off stunt. It was a test of whether a cargo stand next to Ukrainian aircraft can be reached by a cheap quadcopter with a charge that did not go off.

If the detonator had worked, the ministry's own account says the damage and the death toll could have been large. The fact that a bus driver was the effective air defence is the detail that is driving the nine-city list. The legal change for private operators is the part that will be fought over in the Bundestag, because it moves the power to use force against an aircraft from the state to a utility or a factory. That is the trade Berlin is now willing to discuss.