German security services can now name two suspects in the drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport with high probability, one of them attributed to Russian military intelligence, Welt am Sonntag reported, citing secret investigation files it obtained. The paper says that evidence is what allowed Berlin to blame Russia publicly a week and a half ago. Russia has denied any involvement.

The two men

The main suspects are a Belarusian citizen, Andrei Ka., and a Russian, Oleg Le., according to security sources cited by the paper. German investigators believe Le. was responsible for the preparation and logistics of the attack, and attribute him to the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency.

Le. entered Germany through Türkiye, landing at Berlin Brandenburg airport, and later left from the same airport for Serbia. He is now back in Russia. Investigators knew at the point of entry that he was tied to the GRU's circle, and he was not surveilled afterward.

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What was on the drone

The attack used three drones at Leipzig/Halle airport on the evening of 4 August, and two were destroyed at launch for reasons still unclear. The third landed beside a Ukrainian transport aircraft and sat there for hours. About 1.8 kg of Semtex, built into a vegetable can, failed to fire because a detonator tore loose. The Antonov it reached held 25,000 liters of kerosene, and investigators estimate a detonation would have destroyed parts of the airport.

How the trail was found

Forensic technicians recovered glove remains with DNA traces from the antenna used to fly the drone, and those traces were already on file in Finland and Lithuania, where Ka. has a record for ordinary criminal offenses, including theft in Finland. Polish prosecutors separately link him to a hardware-store fire in Łódź in the summer of 2024 that they treat as sabotage directed from Russia, which fits the pattern European authorities have documented since 2022: Russian services hiring residents, often migrants, to burn warehouses and malls. The Leipzig explosives are thought to have crossed from Bulgaria through Serbia in truck cavities and gone into buried caches, and police found several suspected hiding places after examining the suspects' rental-car data.

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What Berlin has done about it

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt blamed Russia at a joint press conference on 1 September, ordering the closure of Russia's last consulate in the country and scrapping the agreement behind Moscow's cultural center in Berlin. Russia's embassy claims more than 150 of its mission staff and their families must now leave Germany, and Moscow answered by closing the German consulate in St Petersburg and the Goethe institutes.

Four days after the attribution, German investigators suspected Russian intelligence behind an arson attack on a defense company.