Police in the German state of Saxony said a drone carrying an unknown explosive device was found on Wednesday in the secure cargo flight operations area near Leipzig airport’s southern runway. The Leipzig/Halle Airport drone explosion scare came after an employee spotted it a few metres short of a Ukrainian Antonov cargo plane.
The finding mattered because Leipzig airport is the European base of Ukrainian Antonov jets used for heavy cargo, and the site is also used by Nato, the German military and DHL. A second unidentified flying object later collided with a DHL cargo plane several hundred metres above the ground, leaving the aircraft with minor damage.
Leipzig airport and DHL
German media reported that the attached bomb was made of PETN and semtex plastic explosive, and that the bomb did not explode because the detonator was faulty. A local newspaper said police discovered as much as 800g of explosive. Trevor Lawrence, an explosives expert with Cranfield University, said that 800g of explosive would be “enough to do considerable damage” to a plane.
The airport has already been linked to a firebomb posted via DHL in July 2024, and a second firebomb travelled to the UK and caught fire at a warehouse in Birmingham in July 2024. Two similar packages were also found in Poland. A subsequent pan-European investigation identified 22 suspects in Lithuania and Poland who are suspected of having been employed by Russian intelligence, and investigators found that perpetrators were recruited and given instructions online and were frequently paid in cryptocurrency.
Security gap at the perimeter
The latest incident was described as the first time a drone with explosives had been found in Europe far from the Ukrainian border. That leaves the central operational question on the airport side: how the drone got inside the perimeter of Leipzig airport, and whether the drone and the later collision involving the DHL cargo plane point to a broader attempt to test cargo-flight security at a site used for Ukrainian Antonov, Nato, the German military and DHL operations.
For airlines and cargo operators using Leipzig airport, the immediate practical fact is simple: a drone with an unknown explosive device reached the secure cargo flight operations area, and another object still managed to hit a DHL cargo plane. The next hard fact in the record is the police account from the German state of Saxony and the continuing scrutiny around the airport’s cargo perimeter.
