A 48-year-old man suspected of carrying out a series of sabotage attacks on Germany's electricity infrastructure has been arrested near the Weisweiler power plant in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, police in Cologne announced on Tuesday. The suspect, identified by German media as Daniel V., was detained at a traffic stop near Weisweiler — a site roughly 20 kilometres from the Dutch border with the Limburg region — and was found to be carrying explosives at the time of his arrest. Officers also discovered a nearby tent rigged with additional explosive devices.

The attacks, which took place across three German states — Brandenburg and Saxony in the east, and North Rhine-Westphalia in the west — followed a distinctive pattern. The suspect allegedly used homemade rockets fitted with long wires and timed fuses to shoot cables across high-voltage power lines, causing short circuits. At least two attacks partially succeeded: one at the Jänschwalde substation in Brandenburg briefly forced part of a nearby coal plant offline, and another near Cologne caused a short circuit that took a section of a power station out of service for several days. In Saxony alone, police found 21 launch devices near high-voltage lines last Friday and Saturday. The state's interior minister, Armin Schuster, acknowledged the incidents could have triggered a regional blackout.

Authorities had been searching for Daniel V. for several days, publishing his photograph and conducting large-scale searches including of the Hambach Forest area — near where he was ultimately found. He had drawn investigators' attention after sending confession letters to German media, including the newspaper taz, and later to police themselves. In the letters, he described electricity generation from coal as "a crime that causes indescribable suffering" — leading Germany's interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt of the CSU, to describe the case as suspected "climate extremism" by a lone actor. Investigators are formally examining a terrorist motive.

However, questions remain about the case. Experts noted several unusual features in the letters: the suspect included his full name and home address, used strikingly few words to justify his actions — atypical for politically motivated perpetrators — and employed phrases such as a positive reference to "law and order" that sit uneasily with the stated climate motivation. The timing has also drawn attention: the attack series began almost simultaneously with a German government announcement attributing a drone strike on Leipzig airport to Russia. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Daniel V.'s notes reportedly included targets in the Netherlands, with the city of Doetinchem listed among potential sites. His mother, reached by the taz before his arrest, confirmed the handwriting in the letters was her son's, and said he had a strong sense of justice but sometimes "overshot the mark."

Daniel V. is reported to be a trained physician who was unemployed and living with his mother in Gevelsberg, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. With his arrest, authorities hope many of the outstanding questions about the attacks — including whether he acted alone — can now be answered.