German police continue to negotiate with the armed man who drove his car onto the tarmac of Hamburg airport on Saturday evening and has since held his own daughter hostage.
According to the police, the hostage taker may have explosives with him. The girl may be physically unharmed, police say.
“We currently assume that the child is physically fine. This is evident from the eye contact we have at the moment and from the telephone calls with the perpetrator, in which the child can be heard in the background,” a police spokeswoman told the German news agency DPA. “I don’t want to speculate about the child’s mental state,” she added.
About the perpetrator, the police said that it should be assumed ‘that he is in possession of a loaded firearm and possibly also explosives of an unknown type’. “Our top priority is protecting the child.”
Negotiations
The police have been negotiating with the hostage taker since Saturday evening, apparently in Turkish. “Police psychologists are present and we are currently speaking to the perpetrator. We rely on a negotiated solution,” the police spokesman said earlier on Sunday. “He wants to talk to us and we initially assess that as very positive.”
Since Saturday evening at just after 8 p.m., air traffic to and from Hamburg has been halted because the armed man drove his car through the airport barriers and parked his car next to a Turkish Airlines plane. He also fired two shots in the air with a pistol. He also set several fires in the vicinity of the airport and threw two Molotov cocktails from his car. No significant damage was caused and the fires were quickly extinguished.
The man, who according to police is about 35 years old, had taken his daughter earlier in the day from her mother in Stade, in the state of Lower Saxony. The mother then reported the kidnapping to the police, who suspect that there is a conflict over custody of the girl.
The mother has now been taken care of by a crisis intervention team. According to the German newspaper Image does the man want to be flown to Turkey together with the child? Initially there were already passengers on the Turkish Airlines plane, but the plane has since been evacuated.
Air traffic suspended
The airport announced around 4 a.m. Sunday morning that air traffic will remain suspended indefinitely and that cancellations and delays will continue throughout the day. The police ask passengers not to go to the airport. The airport and all aircraft on the tarmac were evacuated on Saturday evening. At least 27 flights and 3,200 passengers have already been affected. Stranded travelers were transferred to a hotel last night.
Hamburg airport was already temporarily closed in October due to a threatened terrorist attack on a plane from the Iranian capital Tehran to Hamburg.