HANNOVER, Germany — “Serious plans for explosions” forced the evacuation of a stadium in Hannover, Germany, on Tuesday night before a Netherlands-Germany friendly soccer match, the police chief for Germany’s Lower Saxony region told Germany’s public broadcaster NDR.
“We had concrete evidence that someone wanted to set off an explosive device in the stadium,” Hannover police chief Volker Kluwe told German TV.
A short time later a second stadium in Hannover was evacuated due to a bomb threat. Concert-goers were at the stadium to see the band “Soehne Mannheims.”
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters that a section of city’s central train station was closed after a suspicious object was found.
After police searched the stadium, a German security official said no explosives were found outside the stadium. Also, Boris Pistorius, the interior minister for Lower-Saxony state, told reporters that no arrests had been made.
De Maiziere refused to provide specifics of the threat, saying it could unsettle Germans and make future decisions more difficult. He asked for “trust,” saying “some of these answers would unsettle the population, some of these answers would make our actions in future harder and (…) some of these answers might lead the source of the information not to provide tips to us anymore.”
The German national team tweeted that the game had been canceled, and “#DieMannschaft are under police protection and have been escorted to a safe place.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and at least three other top government officials were expected to attend the match, Merkel’s office said.
Kluwe told German public broadcaster NDR that the alleged threat involved the “detonation of explosives in the stadium.” He says the “key warning reached us about 15 minutes before the gates opened.”
Kluwe encouraged people in Hannover to go home, stay away from stadiums and not move about in large groups.
An announcement by police informed spectators about an hour and a half before kickoff on Tuesday that the stadium would be evacuated.
According to DW Sports, police said there “was a device intended to be detonated inside the stadium.”
Germany’s top security official says the decision to cancel the match was made after authorities received mounting information during the course of the day about a possible attack.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters he wouldn’t name the source of the information that led to the match in Hannover being called off shortly before it was to take place. The German news agency dpa cited unnamed security officials in Berlin that a foreign intelligence agency had warned Germany of a possible attack by Islamic extremists.
The incident comes four days after three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis during a soccer match between France and Germany. The bombers died in the explosions, as did one bystander. That was one of several terror attacks across the French capital Friday night that killed at least 129 people and wounded hundreds more.
BREAKING: According to BILD, the TUI-Arena is now also being evacuated. The Söhne Mannheims pop band were playing there tonight.— DW Sports (@dw_sports) November 17, 2015
France and England were still scheduled to play a friendly soccer match Tuesday night at London’s Wembley Stadium. Leading up to the game, London police increased their presence around the stadium and at several busy areas, such as transport hubs, across the British capital.
