By Friederike Heine
BERLIN, Sept 3 (Reuters) – Germany was investigating a suspected arson attack outside a defence firm in Munich on Thursday, days after two sabotage attempts on the power grid and a month after an airport drone attack that Berlin and its allies blamed on Russia.
Police said they were looking into a fire overnight at a construction site at the headquarters of defence firm Rohde & Schwarz, whose products include radar systems to detect, track and jam drones.
A 28-year-old woman and a 38-year-old man, both Bulgarian nationals, were arrested at a petrol station close to the site in connection with the incident, a police spokesperson in the southern state of Bavaria said.
GERMANY ON ALERT AFTER ATTEMPTS ON POWER GRID
The fire caused no significant damage before it was extinguished and no one was injured, officials said. Rohde & Schwarz said there had been a “police and fire brigade operation” near its premises, but did not elaborate.
German authorities are on high alert for threats to critical infrastructure. This week, police investigated two attempts to sabotage the electricity grid within 24 hours in the states of Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Also this week, Berlin formally blamed Russia for an attempted drone attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle airport in August, prompting calls by European allies for tighter sanctions on Moscow.
Russia strongly denies involvement and on Thursday said it would close Germany’s Goethe-Institut cultural centres in a tit-for-tat measure after similar moves from Berlin.
German authorities have said they could not rule out either foreign involvement or domestic left-wing extremists behind this week’s sabotage cases on the power grid.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has warned that foreign powers could also use extremist groups as proxies for sabotage operations in Germany.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul was hosting his French and Polish counterparts to discuss security on Thursday.
At that meeting in Weimar, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Warsaw had summoned the Russian ambassador to express a “strong condemnation of Russian state terrorism” after attempted attacks in Germany.
“Poland supports the reaction and decisions of the German government in connection with aggressive actions on German territory,” Sikorski said at a press conference.
(Additional reporting by Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt and by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz in Warsaw; editing by Matthias Williams and Andrew Heavens)
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