World News | Man in Hamburg Airport Hostage Drama Used a Rental Car and Had No Weapons Permit
Get latest articles and stories on World at LatestLY. A man who drove onto the tarmac at Hamburg Airport with his 4-year-old daughter, starting an 18-hour standoff with police that ended with his arrest, was using a rental car and lacked a weapons permit, authorities said on Monday.
Berlin, Nov 6 (AP) A man who drove onto the tarmac at Hamburg Airport with his 4-year-old daughter, starting an 18-hour standoff with police that ended with his arrest, was using a rental car and lacked a weapons permit, authorities said on Monday.
Operations at the airport returned to normal on Monday after the lengthy closure caused by the hostage situation, and the airport operator signalled that it would strengthen security.
Also Read | Nobel Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi Goes on Hunger Strike in Iran Prison.
The 35-year-old Turkish citizen broke through an airport gate on Saturday evening, fired into the air and threw two incendiary devices out of the car, according to witnesses, before parking the vehicle under a plane just outside a terminal building.
He had reportedly taken his daughter from her mother in Stade, some 52 kilometers (32 miles) from Hamburg, in an ongoing custody battle, and was already under investigation for allegedly kidnapping his daughter and taking her to Turkey without authorisation last year.
Also Read | US Shooting: Shooter Fires 22 Shots Into Cincinnati Crowd, Killing Minor Boy and Wounding Five Others.
Stade police spokesperson Rainer Bohmbach said that the vehicle used at the airport was a rental car, German news agency dpa reported. He said it wasn't known whether he worked for a car rental company, but that was unlikely.
The suspect has no weapons permit, said Liddy Oechtering, a spokesperson for Hamburg prosecutors. She said they would seek to have him kept in custody on suspicion of hostage-taking, removal of a minor and offenses under weapons laws.
The airport operator said that it will “implement further construction measures to strengthen possible entry points to the security area,” dpa reported. It didn't give details.
“German airports are fundamentally very safe,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz's spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, told reporters in Berlin. But “what we have now seen in Hamburg shows that time and again there are gaps in the concept, and that someone with high criminal energy who apparently is also very desperate can manage to use such gaps.”
“It is also clear that no concept is so good that it can't be made even better,” he said. (AP)
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)