Dan Sabbagh writes:

The armed drone found at Leipzig airport on Wednesday may not have exploded, but the fact that it got inside the perimeter, close to Ukrainian cargo planes, raises obvious concerns for the security of international aviation.

Though the identity of the culprits is unknown, the initial evidence points firmly towards a Russian-orchestrated plot. It is the first time that a drone with explosives has been found in Europe far from the Ukrainian border.

Photographs published by German newspapers show a quadcopter, a design familiar from the Ukraine war, with a package attached. It lies a few metres short of a Ukrainian Antonov cargo plane, with its easily identifiable yellow and blue trim livery.

Police from the German state of Saxony confirmed that the drone was “carrying an unknown explosive device” discovered by an employee in the “secure cargo flight operations area” near the airport’s southern runway.

German media reported the attached bomb was made of PETN and semtex plastic explosive – the second of the two being the munition that exploded inside Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. But the bomb attached to the drone did not explode, because the detonator was faulty.

A local newspaper, Leipziger Volkszeitung, said police discovered as much as 800g of explosive. This would be “enough to do considerable damage” to a plane, according to Trevor Lawrence, an explosives expert with Cranfield University, not least because “aeroplane bodies are ridiculously thin, often only 3mm aluminium”.

Whether the explosive was specifically semtex, invented in Czechoslovakia, or from another country may not have been determined. But any type of plastic explosive has typically only been available to militaries or well-established terror groups, not to reckless amateur drone pilots messing around. [Continue reading…]