After eighteen hours, a youngster involved in a hostage scenario at Hamburg Airport has been released, according to local authorities.
With his four-year-old daughter in the car, the 35-year-old man drove past a security checkpoint and onto the airport runway on Saturday night, where he parked beneath an aircraft.
Eventually, police said he turned himself in “without resistance” and was taken into custody. “The child appears to be unharmed,” they posted on X (formerly Twitter app).
Numerous flights into and out of the airport were disrupted as a result of the event. Since then, operations have continued, but there have been notable delays.
The suspect started it at around 19:00 GMT (local time) when he pulled his car up to the airport’s apron, which is where the planes are normally parked.
They then explained that he pulled over in the area where a passenger-filled commercial aeroplane was getting ready to take off. Every passenger on board made a safe escape.
The local media said that he parked beneath a Turkish Airlines aircraft. Numerous individuals who were awaiting aircraft at the airport were relocated to motels.
The man planned to take the kid to Turkey, according to Hamburg police spokesperson Sandra Levgruen, who stated earlier on Sunday that he disagreed with several of the decisions made by the authorities about the custody arrangement.
“He speaks about his life being a heap of shards,” she said to ZDF, a German news platform. The man had been in an “exceptional psychological situation due to custody disputes with his ex-wife,” following the event, according to the authorities.
The man, a resident of Turkey, has already been charged with kidnapping the little child. He was looked into last year after taking her to Turkey without her consent. Afterwards, the mother took the kid to Germany again.
Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher posted on X following the end of the hostage crisis, “I wish the mother, the child, and her family a lot of strength to cope with this terrible experience.”
According to the airport, efforts are being made to promptly restart operations. According to what it claimed earlier, 286 flights carrying around 34,500 people were planned on Sunday.
