Overview
- Berlin police and prosecutors carried out broad searches targeting four people suspected of setting fire to two power masts in 2025, with about 500 officers searching left-wing spaces and homes in several Berlin districts plus sites in Düsseldorf, Kyritz and Hamburg.
- Officers seized phones, laptops, documents and other electronics, and a lawyer familiar with the cases said no arrest warrants had been issued.
- The September 2025 blackout cut power to roughly 50,000 households and 2,000 businesses across parts of Berlin and the nearby town of Schönefeld.
- Wista, which runs the Adlershof technology park hit by the outage, now puts losses linked to the attack at €30 million to €70 million.
- Left groups call the searches political repression, while the police union used the operation to press for wider surveillance tools such as on-device wiretapping, mandatory IP data retention and AI systems.