The drone at Leipzig/Halle Airport reached its target. Surveillance footage reviewed by investigators shows the aircraft flying straight at a parked Ukrainian Antonov An-124 on the evening of August 4 and striking one of its wings, Die Zeit reported Monday. The charge tore loose on impact and came to rest on the ground. It never detonated.

The bus driver never kicked it out of the air either. He found the drone lying near the southern runway hours later, pinned it under his foot, and called security. That account replaces the story a Bundestag committee chairman told reporters Friday, the story DroneXL ran as Sunday’s headline. We got it wrong, and this report corrects it.

Monday also delivered the strongest lead yet: DNA on the drone matches a trace from the 2024 arson attack on the airport’s DHL hub, and the profile was already on file in Lithuania.

Camera Footage Shows The Drone Struck The Antonov’s Wing

Surveillance recordings evaluated by investigators show the drone deliberately approaching one of the parked Antonovs at about 19:30 on Tuesday, August 4, hitting a wing where the fuel tanks sit, then bouncing to the ground without detonating, according to Die Zeit’s Monday report. Marks on the aircraft support that sequence, and Tagesspiegel notes Der Spiegel had already reported a piece of the drone was found on an Antonov wing last week. The explosive package separated on impact and skidded to a stop some distance from the airframe.

Germany came closer to catastrophe than anyone said out loud last week. An armed charge hit the wing of a strategic airlifter, the part of the aircraft built to hold the kerosene, and the only reason Leipzig is a forensics story is a detonator that did not fire.

The discovery looked different than reported too. According to Saxony’s Landeskriminalamt, the bus driver noticed the drone on the southern runway shortly before midnight, roughly four hours after the strike. Die Zeit reports he found it already on the ground, hesitated briefly, then pinned it under one foot and alerted airport security. No kick. No drone in flight.

That ends the account Detlef Seif, the CDU chairman of the Bundestag’s interior committee, gave reporters Friday after a closed-door briefing, in which the driver kicked the machine out of the air as it flew low. DroneXL led Sunday’s report with Seif’s version. In that same piece we flagged that camera footage showed no second takeoff after the drone crossed the fence, a discrepancy investigators had not resolved. The cameras were right. The kick never happened, and our Sunday headline was wrong.

DNA On The Drone Matches The 2024 DHL Parcel Attack

Investigators secured DNA from the drone that matches a trace recovered after the July 20, 2024 arson attack on the DHL logistics center at this same airport, Bild reported Monday, and Die Zeit reports the identical profile was registered once before in Lithuania. The trace has not been matched to a person, per Bild.

The geography does the talking. The 2024 fire came from one of four incendiary parcels mailed out of Vilnius, a plot DroneXL detailed Friday, and the Leipzig package burned on the ground only because its flight was delayed. Five men are on trial in Vilnius right now over those parcels, part of a network of 22 suspects European investigators tie to Russia’s GRU military intelligence service. Lithuania keeps surfacing in this file for another reason as well: in May, a Ukrainian military drone that veered off course crossed into the country undetected by radar and crashed in a field with explosives aboard, per Reuters. Different sender, same lesson about low-altitude airspace.

Bild also reports the Leipzig case may involve two aircraft. Evidence is firming, per the paper, that a second drone, still unfound, acted as a mothership relaying control signals and live video to the operators, and that it is what a DHL freighter clipped during its go-around after the runway closed. Investigators believe a professional team steered both machines from near the airport. The search for the pilots continues.

Germany’s federal prosecutor general took over the case Thursday, citing its importance, and is investigating attempted triggering of an explosion and dangerous interference with air traffic. The American read keeps hardening: the Wall Street Journal reported the drone likely belongs to the Russian government, and CNN quoted a U.S. defense official in Europe saying Washington concluded it came from a Russian intelligence service. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, put it plainly on Welt TV: “Who else could it be but Russia?” German authorities have made no attribution, Moscow denies involvement, and drones circled Europe’s only Patriot repair base at Mechernich two nights after the strike.

An American Radar Now Stands Watch On The Old Tower

Federal police have set up a watch post with a specialized radar on the visitor platform of the airport’s old control tower, dpa reported over the weekend, and the Saxon news portal Tag24 identifies the unit as an EchoShield, the counter-drone radar built by Echodyne of Kirkland, Washington. The Bundespolizei declines to confirm the type, citing operational tactics.

The identification fits the mission. DroneXL profiled Echodyne in June, when its laptop-sized EchoShield, a radar that can track a quadcopter the size of a dinner plate at 5 kilometers (3.1 miles), became the primary sensor in a $490 million U.S. Air Force counter-drone program. The company’s radars already run at Lithuanian training grounds and in combat in Ukraine.

Radar is the correct answer to how this drone got in. Bild reported the aircraft was built so the airport’s installed defense system could not detect it and carried two SIM cards, possibly for steering it over cellular networks. If that reading holds, the failure needs no mystery. A drone commanded through a phone network, or flying a preprogrammed route, gives radio-frequency scanners nothing to hear. Radar does not listen for a control link. It tracks the airframe, whatever the aircraft transmits or doesn’t.

Berlin is moving on the manpower side as well. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt is doubling the federal police counter-drone force at the Joint Drone Defense Center from 150 to 300 officers and its operational bases from four to eight, per Bild am Sonntag. A drone-security research facility is scheduled to be established at the German Aerospace Center’s test airport in Cochstedt on August 18. “The drone technology arms race requires research units of our own to keep pace,” Dobrindt told the paper, per dpa.

DroneXL’s Take

I wrote Sunday’s headline. I also wrote, in that same story, that the kick account clashed with camera footage showing no second takeoff after the drone crossed the fence. The tape and the anecdote could not both be true, and I put the anecdote in the headline anyway, because a committee chairman said it on the record after a classified briefing. That is on me. In a hybrid warfare case, a title and a briefing room do not outrank a timestamp. When an official’s story and the camera log disagree, hold the camera log, even when it costs you the better headline.

Strip out the folklore and the incident gets worse. The comforting version had a lucky boot stopping the bomb short of its target. The camera version has the bomb reaching its target: a charge slamming into the wing of an An-124, tearing loose, and lying on an active airfield for four hours while no sensor and no person noticed. The one component that performed as Germany needed on August 4 was a defect in the attacker’s detonator.

So the radar on the tower balcony is the right tool arriving late. This attacker built for a defense that listens, and the answer is a machine that looks. An EchoShield is designed to detect and track small drones kilometers out, which is precisely the capability the apron lacked, and it plugs into shoot-down authority German police have held since October. The legal gap closed last fall. The hardware gap stayed open until a bomb reached an Antonov’s wing, and even now it has closed at exactly one airport.

Two dates anchor what comes next. The Vilnius parcel trial is in session, and if the DNA match survives scrutiny, the Leipzig drone walks into that courtroom with it, so watch whether the Bundesanwaltschaft formally joins the two files. And Cochstedt opens as a drone-security research site on August 18, which will show whether Berlin’s answer is capability or another coordination body. This story has now moved three times in six days. When it moves again, the correction will run as loud as the scoop. That is the only way coverage of this campaign stays worth reading.

Sources: Die Zeit, Bild, Tagesspiegel, dpa, t-online, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.