Explosive drone flown into a parked Ukrainian An-124 at Leipzig/Halle Airport, federal prosecutors investigating up to three drones

Shortly before midnight on 4 August 2026, at about 23:40, a drone was found on the apron near the southern runway at Leipzig/Halle Airport, beside a parked Ukrainian Antonov An-124 heavy cargo aircraft. An X-ray examination showed explosives and a detonator attached to it.

The Saxon State Criminal Police Office described the find as a drone carrying an unknown explosive device. Police spokesperson Olaf Hoppe said federal police examined the object found near the southern runway, and it was rendered safe in a controlled explosion. German reporting indicates that the detonator was defective.

Flight operations were suspended shortly after midnight. A DHL cargo aircraft that had to abort its landing because of the closure struck an unidentified object while climbing away, about six kilometres from the airport at roughly 400 metres altitude, according to ZDFheute and Euronews. It landed safely at Hanover, where minor damage to the nose section was found. Bild reported that the airport counter-drone system had detected two drones that night.

One passenger flight and several cargo flights were diverted and the northern runway reopened at about 01:55. The investigation is led by the counter-extremism and counter-terrorism units of the Saxon state criminal police together with the Bundespolizei. As ESUT noted, Leipzig/Halle hosts NATO's SALIS strategic airlift arrangement and is Antonov Airlines' main base outside Ukraine.

Airport surveillance footage, analysed by Die Zeit and reported on 10 August 2026, changed the picture of that night substantially. The recordings show an object flying directly at one of the parked Ukrainian An-124 freighters at about 19:30 on 4 August, striking one of the aircraft wings and falling to the ground, roughly four hours before an airport bus driver came across it on the apron. Impact marks on the wing match that sequence, and Der Spiegel had already reported drone parts recovered from the wing. The charge was a commercially available tin can filled with Semtex plastic explosive with a detonator fitted to its base; the detonator was defective or was torn off, and the explosive separated from the airframe on impact and was found at some distance from it. The drone carried a release mechanism and two SIM cards.

The Federal Prosecutor General took the case over from the Dresden general prosecutor office on 6 August 2026, investigating attempted causing of an explosion and dangerous interference with air traffic and describing the events as a serious attack on Germany transport and logistics infrastructure; the Bundeskriminalamt leads the police investigation. Investigators secured a DNA trace on the drone that is reported to match a trace from the 20 July 2024 parcel-bomb arson at the DHL logistics centre at the same airport, a trace already registered in Lithuania but not yet tied to a named person. On 25 August 2026 NDR, WDR and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that as many as three drones may have been involved: a third drone was recovered on 14 August from a field at Kabelsketal west of the airport, where BKA forensic technicians secured about 50 grams of the military explosive hexogen, and a construction with an antenna and electronics taped to a tree was seized at Kursdorf north of the airport, with burned earth and metal parts nearby.

The footage removes the main ambiguity that stood after the first week. The drone did not drift, crash or lie abandoned next to the An-124; it was flown at the aircraft and hit a wing, which places the case squarely in the sabotage category and makes intent a matter of record rather than inference. What prevented a detonation appears to have been a technical failure of the initiation chain, not the absence of an attack. The evidentiary picture has also widened rather than narrowed: a recovered control set-up at Kursdorf, a third explosive-carrying drone at Kabelsketal and a DNA trace shared with the 2024 GRU-linked DHL parcel plot in Lithuania all point to a prepared, multi-element operation rather than an isolated act. Two elements have moved the other way. The second drone has never been recovered, and investigators have grown sceptical that the DHL freighter struck a drone at all after organic traces were found at the damaged area, so the link between the apron find and the in-flight damage should now be treated as contested rather than parallel. Attribution remains formally open: no arrests have been made and no German government body has publicly named a state actor, even though security sources assume Russian intelligence services were involved in the planning and Moscow denies it.