BERLIN: Air traffic at Hamburg airport was suspended on Sunday due to a hostage situation on the tarmac involving a father and his child, German officials said.
Bild newspaper reported that the 35-year-old Turkish man asked to be allowed to board a plane to Turkey with his four-year-old daughter.
“Negotiations continue,” police said in Turkish on the former Twitter handle
Police said he fired two shots into the air and threw two burning bottles out of the vehicle.
The driver barricaded himself and his child in his car at the bottom of the Turkish Airlines plane.
“We believe the child is physically well,” police spokeswoman Sandra Levgruen told regional television channel NDR.
“This is what we can see and understand from our phone conversation with the man responsible for what happened. “We can hear the child’s voice in the background.”
“I don’t want to talk about his mental state,” the spokesman added.
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“We’re talking, talking, talking again” with the father, he added, “and trying to find a peaceful solution.”
Authorities said that the cause of the incident was believed to be a dispute over the custody of the child, and that the driver’s wife made an emergency call and informed the police that her child had been kidnapped.
“We are on the ground with a large number of emergency services. We assume there is a static hostage situation at this time,” police from the northern city previously posted on X.
Levgruen said it was “a very good sign” that the father remained in contact with authorities for a long time.
On Sunday morning, the airport management posted on X, “Police operation continues, air traffic will be stopped until further notice.”
17 flights scheduled to land in Hamburg on Saturday evening were diverted. Another 286 flights are planned for Sunday, carrying approximately 34,500 passengers.
news source (www.brecorder.com)
