AINEWS
Six overflights at a US Patriot missile maintenance site in Mechernich and an explosive device near Ukrainian cargo planes at Leipzig/Halle; no operator has been named.
German military police could not bring down the drone that circled Mechernich on Thursday night. The Bundeswehr (Germany's armed forces) base in North Rhine-Westphalia, about 35 kilometers from the Belgian border, stores spare parts for US Patriot air defense systems (a US-made surface-to-air missile system operated by the German military) in an underground warehouse roughly 130 meters below the surface. A small drone spent the night overhead anyway. Private security staff counted six overflights between about 10 p.m. Thursday and 5 a.m. Friday, and officers arriving on scene later reported a large drone still circling above the site, according to Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
A Bundeswehr spokesperson told the AFP wire service that military police were deployed after two drones were first spotted around 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) and that the case was then handed to Polizei Euskirchen, the regional state police force. The pattern matches what investigators found two days earlier, on Tuesday, at Leipzig/Halle Airport: an explosive-laden drone was recovered near the runway, close to several Ukrainian Antonov An-124 cargo planes (a heavy-lift strategic airlifter) on the ground. Rheinische Post independently corroborated the Thursday sighting at Mechernich and the police handover.
The Mechernich investigation has now drawn in Germany's military counterintelligence service, the MAD, and the Joint Drone Countermeasures Center in Berlin, Sueddeutsche reported. The Bundeswehr has not publicly blamed any foreign country for either incident. The AFP dispatch cites only "some lawmakers" who have accused Russia, which has been at war with Ukraine since 2022. The Russian embassy in Berlin on Friday called the Leipzig episode a "fabricated provocation," the wire reported.
The suspected drone at Mechernich is a Fly-380 VTOL, per Sueddeutsche, with a 3.80-meter wingspan, roughly 400 kilometers of range, and a top speed near 150 km/h. The identification is reported as suspect, not confirmed by the Bundeswehr. A platform in that class costs a fraction of the Patriot battery it circled. A counter-small-UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) system built to find, identify, and stop it above a 30,000-square-meter underground warehouse has to be built to a different budget than the air defense it nominally protects.
Two incidents in four days at sites with high-value hardware, with the case already passed from base security to state police to federal counterintelligence, raise the question of what changes next in how Germany tracks small drones over its own bases. The investigation has not produced a public suspect, a payload analysis, or a confirmed platform. The next concrete read is whether German officials name the operator behind the Fly-380, or treat small drones above strategic sites as the new normal.