Incendiary sabotage of the Cologne-Duesseldorf railway near Leverkusen

On Friday 10 July 2026 a fire broke out at two points along the embankment of the Cologne-Düsseldorf main line north of Leverkusen, damaging lineside signal cables and forcing the closure of one of Germany's busiest rail corridors. According to WDR and ZDFheute, investigators treated the blaze as deliberate, and the Bundespolizei opened an investigation into suspected sabotage. Long-distance and regional services were heavily disrupted, with ICE and IC trains diverted via Neuss and Dormagen and S-Bahn and regional lines curtailed or replaced by buses.

A statement posted on the left-wing platform Indymedia under the name Kommando Angry Birds claimed responsibility. It said incendiary devices fitted with timers and roughly one litre of barbecue lighter fluid had been placed in a large cable shaft at the northeastern corner of the railway bridge over the Wupper and in a narrower shaft further along the line toward Langenfeld. The group framed the attack as opposition to the technological-industrial system, citing what it called a mass extinction driven by industrial progress.

A Cologne police spokesman said the claim of responsibility was known and its authenticity was being examined, and security officials were reported to assess it as genuine. Deutsche Bahn said it could not initially forecast when the line would reopen. Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies Kommando Angry Birds as a left-extremist group, and the same name was attached to arson on the Düsseldorf-Duisburg rail line in the summer of 2025.

The attack fits a documented pattern of low-cost, high-impact sabotage of rail signalling infrastructure, where burning a single cable run can paralyse a whole corridor. Responsibility rests on a claim by the left-extremist group Kommando Angry Birds that police and security services were still verifying rather than on a charged suspect, so attribution is assessed rather than proven. The recurrence of the group's name, already attached to the 2025 Düsseldorf-Duisburg rail arson, points to a persistent anti-technology campaign against North Rhine-Westphalia rail infrastructure. The entry will be updated as the investigation develops.