Cologne Police Arrest Gevelsberg Suspect at Weisweiler With Explosives, Reul Points to a Lone Perpetrator

The police statement places the arrest in the surroundings of the plant, where officers had found several launch devices by the lines on 7 September and, beside one, a further confession letter whose contents were withheld. The man carried "further explosive devices", and in the undergrowth officers found "a tent, fitted with further explosive charges"; a Land criminal office defuser examined both. The warrant is the Cottbus prosecutor's, for the 1 September attack at Turnow-Preilack, on suspicion of causing an explosion and disrupting public utilities.

Reul, in Düsseldorf: "He was still on the move and wanted to carry on. This game was ended today", and: "At the moment everything points to a lone perpetrator and to everything having come from his hand." Dobrindt, on the confession letters: "The knowledge revealed in these letters is clear perpetrator knowledge." The police did not say whether Monday's devices had fired, announced no forensic link between the man and the Bergheim, Dormagen or Saxony devices, and the federal prosecutor general, examining a takeover since 4 September, had decided nothing by evening.

The arrest ends the manhunt and reopens the question the letters had closed. On 4 September Reul cautioned that "if someone puts his name under it, he is not necessarily the one responsible"; on Tuesday he gave a provisional lone-perpetrator read ahead of the forensics and ahead of the federal decision, and the foreign-direction question he himself raised on Friday is so far answered only by him. Two steps would test it: a match between the man's devices and the ones defused in Brandenburg, Saxony and elsewhere in North Rhine-Westphalia, and whether Karlsruhe takes a case the Land prosecutors currently hold in pieces; the sequence from the first short circuit is in Großwald's dispatch on Turnow-Preilack and Bergheim, and Signal No. 141 carries the arrest day.