Angela Merkel has said intelligence services who ordered the cancellation of a football friendly between Germany and Holland in Hanover on Tuesday night after a terror attack tipoff had made a difficult but responsible decision.
The German chancellor, who had been scheduled to attend the match, which was organised swiftly on Sunday as an act of solidarity with the victims of the Paris attacks, said the security services had had to weigh up “freedom and security” but had “made a responsible decision”.
Without giving any details as to what the police had described as “concrete information” that an attack on the stadium had been planned, she said: “I was just as sad as millions of fans that the cancellation had to take place.” Merkel, who along with half her cabinet had been due to attend the Hanover match, flew back to Berlin as soon as the event was cancelled.
She thanked football fans and the residents of Hanover for reacting so calmly to the police instructions for them to leave the stadium immediately, 91 minutes before kick-off. She also paid tribute to the national football teams of Germany and Holland for being prepared to participate in the match in the first place.
The Hanover incident was the second time in four days that the World Cup winners had been caught up in a major security scare. The team were inside the Stade de France on Friday for a friendly against France when a bomb went off outside, forcing the teams to spend much of the night in the stadium dressing rooms.
Germany is on a high state of alert following the Paris attacks, with repeated warnings from security forces that the country – which despite repeated warnings has not suffered any Islamist terror attack since 9/11 – is very much in the sights of the Islamic State terrorist group.
Merkel concluded her brief, two-minute statement to the nation by thanking the security services. “It has once again become clear how good it is that we have security authorities, not least so that we can continue to hold large-scale events, and to enjoy them,” she said.
Nevertheless, the incident has made Germans nervous, particularly ahead of Bundesliga matches at the weekend, and with the Christmas market season due to start next week.
Reinhard Rauball, acting head of the German Football Association (DFB), said the events in Paris and the threat over Hanover had changed football, “in every way, as of today”, as a big debate raged within the DFB over how to deal with future fixtures.
German authorities continued to defend their decision to cancel the match and in effect to lock down the northern city on Tuesday night, while at the same time insisting they could not give any specific details.
They confirmed they were also searching for a man believed to have planted a hoax bomb on a train at Hanover’s main station on Wednesday evening. It was unclear if that incident was connected to the stadium threat. The man is reported to have left a package on the luggage rack of the train, and to have failed to respond to a female passenger who alerted him to it as he quickly departed from the train. Police described the device as a “well-made fake bomb”.
Holger Münch, president of the federal criminal police (BKA), called the cancellation “unavoidable, because of serious evidence of a planned attack”, but said he could not give any information about “the type of evidence or about the informant”.
Stephan Weil, the prime minister of Lower Saxony, where Hanover is located, also defended the decision to cancel the match. He spoke of “concrete information about concrete dangers” received from a “trusted and secret source” that had made him “personally convinced” that it was right to stop the match. He appealed to Germans to “not become overwhelmed by fears”.
According to German media quoting “security sources”, information was passed to German security forces about 30 hours before the match that a group might be organising an attack on the stadium, involving the use of explosive devices, suicide belts and automatic weapons. Several media organisations reported that French intelligence services had passed crucial information to the Germans, indicating that an Iraqi “sleeper” militant, living in northern Germany, had been the mastermind behind an attack. Authorities have so far failed to confirm or deny this or other details that have been reported.
Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Hermann of the Christian Social Union, sister party to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, told Bavarian television on Tuesday night that the tipoff had come from a foreign intelligence service. He said he had received information on Tuesday indicating that “within the next 48 hours an attack should or could take place at a sporting event in Germany”.
Hanover’s police president, Volker Kluwe, told the German news agency DPA on Tuesday: “We have concrete information that someone in the stadium wanted to detonate an explosion.”
While there was widespread understanding for the authorities’ decision to call off the match, there was also frustration over the lack of official information to have emerged about the danger.
Commentators continued to puzzle over a statement by the federal interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, who called on the public to “put your faith in us, that we had good and bitter reasons to decide the way we did”, and when pressed as to why he could not divulge more, added: “Part of the answers would unsettle the people.”
Boris Pistorius, the interior minister of Lower Saxony, said widespread reports that the plans involved an ambulance packed with explosives being driven into the stadium by someone who had security clearance “could not be confirmed”. He also admitted that in the event of a terrorist detonating a suicide vest, the authorities had no way of protecting people. “There is no protection against that,” he said, at the same time warning people against “spreading fear and panic”.
Questioning just how prepared Germany was to deal with a terror attack, Michael Mertens, the deputy head of the police trade union in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told German television that forces were “under immense pressure” due to the high security alert as well as the refugee crisis, which meant thousands of officers were permanently deployed at Germany’s border. He also said police lacked the equipment to deal with the new terror threat, and should be kitted out with bullet-proof vests that could withstand high-performance weapons such as Kalashnikovs. He also called on football clubs to boost security within stadiums.
Münch, the BKA head, warned against far-right supporters who had been using the attacks in France to “stir up fear with crude theses and to [exploit] this fear for their own means”.
Dagmar Freitag, head of the Bundestag’s sport committee, told German radio that the cancellation had been right, but that while the terror threat would continue to throw a shadow over future sporting events, such events should continue to go ahead.
“We decide … in this free country, how we want to live, and everything else would be a signal to those who want to achieve precisely the opposite of that,” she said.
