German security authorities found handguns hidden in a forest near Berlin last year, and investigators believe the cache was meant for assassinations linked to Russian intelligence. The case has since moved into the federal public prosecutor’s office, which is treating it as suspicion of planning a serious act of violence posing a threat to the state.
Potential targets included defence industry executives, exiled opposition figures and supporters of Ukraine. One suspect had been arrested in Romania, according to unspecified sources cited in the report, and those sources said the suspect may have helped set up the weapons storage.
Süddeutsche Zeitung report on Friday
Süddeutsche Zeitung reported the case on Friday in a story published jointly with NDR and WDR. The report put the cache into a narrower frame than a simple weapons seizure: the handguns were not presented as abandoned arms, but as part of a suspected plan for targeted killings.
That is why the investigation sits with the federal public prosecutor’s office rather than being treated as a routine criminal matter. The office was already examining the case on suspicion of planning a serious act of violence posing a threat to the state, a legal category that points to an alleged state-security threat rather than isolated weapons possession.
Germany intelligence and Russian services
Germany’s domestic intelligence service said it was convinced that those setting up the cache were acting on orders from Russian services. That assessment fits the agency’s broader warning of a heightened risk of Russian sabotage or assassination attempts, and it explains why investigators are reading the forest cache as part of a larger security file rather than a stand-alone discovery.
The Russian embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while Germany’s domestic intelligence service declined to comment. The federal public prosecutor’s office also declined to comment, leaving the report’s account of the Romanian arrest and the suspected role of the arrested person as the most detailed public outline so far. For readers, the immediate practical point is that this is now a live state-security investigation, not a closed episode.
One person inside that story is the arrested suspect in Romania, whose reported role may have been to set up the storage that investigators found near Berlin. What evidence links that suspect, the handguns and Russian intelligence now sits at the center of the federal public prosecutor’s office inquiry.
