In the dark: the mystery behind Germany’s infrastructure sabotage

A wave of arson attacks has left parts of Germany without power — and authorities without answers. Who is sabotaging the grid, and why can’t the state stop them?

Dear Reader,

At around 6am on the morning of January 3rd, one or more assailants started a fire on a cable bridge across the Teltow Canal in southwest Berlin. The target must have been carefully selected. Using a fire accelerant, they burned through five high-voltage and ten medium-voltage cables.

Maybe they were just lucky. More likely, they knew what they were doing. The cable bridge linked the entire southwest corner of the city — including districts such as Wannsee and Zehlendorf, known for their large villas — to a power station just south of the canal.

There was no alternative route for feeding electricity into that part of the city, meaning residents shivered in subzero temperatures for days while the local grid operator replaced the melted cables.

It wasn’t just the capital’s best-heeled residents who were forced into the dark. Hospitals, care homes and nurseries all lost power. The well-executed act of sabotage caused one of the longest blackouts since the Second World War.

Since then, pressure on the political establishment to catch the culprits has been intense. Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, vowed shortly after the attack that “we’re going to get them”.

Police searched the scene for DNA, deployed sniffer dogs and sifted through CCTV footage from nearby U-Bahn stations — but without immediate results.

Within days, the investigation was taken over by the Federal Prosecution Service and the Federal Criminal Agency (BKA), Germany’s top prosecutors and its crack detectives. The case is being treated as an act of terrorism, and a bounty of one million euros has been announced for information that leads to an arrest.

And yet, a month later, no major developments have been announced. No suspects detained. No houses searched.

It appears to have been the perfect crime. The arsonists knew exactly where to strike to cause maximum disruption. They were smart enough not to leave obvious clues. And they were disciplined enough to confide only in people who would keep their secret rather than cash in a million-euro cheque.

This was not the first time a carefully placed fire caused a mass blackout in the capital. Nor was it the first time the police were outwitted.