BERLIN — A person who drove onto the tarmac at Hamburg Airport together with his 4-year-old daughter, beginning an 18-hour standoff with police that ended together with his arrest, was utilizing a rental automotive and lacked a weapons allow, authorities mentioned Monday.
Operations on the airport returned to regular on Monday after the prolonged closure attributable to the hostage scenario, and the airport operator signaled that it could strengthen safety.
The 35-year-old Turkish citizen broke by way of an airport gate on Saturday night, fired into the air and threw two incendiary units out of the automotive, based on witnesses, earlier than parking the automobile underneath a airplane simply outdoors a terminal constructing.
He had reportedly taken his daughter from her mom in Stade, some 52 kilometers (32 miles) from Hamburg, in an ongoing custody battle, and was already underneath investigation for allegedly kidnapping his daughter and taking her to Turkey with out authorization final yr.
Stade police spokesperson Rainer Bohmbach mentioned that the automobile used on the airport was a rental automotive, German information company dpa reported. He mentioned it wasn’t recognized whether or not he labored for a automotive rental firm, however that was unlikely.
The suspect has no weapons allow, mentioned Liddy Oechtering, a spokesperson for Hamburg prosecutors. She mentioned they’d search to have him stored in custody on suspicion of hostage-taking, removing of a minor and offenses underneath weapons legal guidelines.
The airport operator mentioned that it’s going to “implement additional building measures to strengthen doable entry factors to the safety space,” dpa reported. It did not give particulars.
“German airports are essentially very protected,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, instructed reporters in Berlin. However “what we have now now seen in Hamburg reveals that again and again there are gaps within the idea, and that somebody with excessive legal vitality who apparently can also be very determined can handle to make use of such gaps.”
“It is usually clear that no idea is so good that it may well’t be made even higher,” he mentioned.