A suspicious package that prompted the evacuation of a Christmas market near Berlin on Friday was not terror-related but part of an attempt to blackmail the German logistics firm DHL, police say.
The delivery of the parcel containing nails and an improvised explosive device to a pharmacy in the city of Potsdam triggered the temporary evacuation of the nearby Christmas market.
Germany remains on high alert for potential terrorist attacks nearly a year after a Tunisian Islamist rammed a hijacked articulated lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 11 people.
But officials on Sunday ruled out a terror motive in the latest incident after finding a blackmail letter targeted at DHL, whose services were used to deliver the parcel.
“The good news is that we can say, with all likelihood, that the package was not aimed at the Christmas market,” said the Brandenburg state interior minister, Karl-Heinz Schröter. “The bad news is it was a blackmail attempt targeting the DHL delivery service.”
Brandenburg state’s police president, Hans-Jürgen Mörke, said investigators had spent Saturday reassembling a piece of paper with a QR code, which had been torn to shreds during the controlled explosion of the parcel. The QR code contained a message directed at DHL, asking for a sum of several million euros in blackmail money.
Linking Friday’s events to the delivery of a similar parcel in Frankfurt on the Oder in early November, Schröter said current investigations suggested that the blackmailer was acting mainly in the Berlin and Brandenburg area.
Authorities also confirmed that the device could have exploded and seriously injured people.
DHL has so far declined to comment on the case, according to Bild newspaper.
The German logistics market leader, which is part of Deutsche Post, delivered 1.2bn parcels in the country last year, including 8.4m packages on its Christmas peak day alone.
