Commuter walks through Wannsee S-Bahn station during a power outage in southwest Berlin, January 4, 2026, after sabotage of cables cut electricity to tens of thousands of homes.
RALF HIRSCHBERGER / AFP
The blackout exposed vulnerabilities in the capital’s power grid, prompting a major investigation.
More than six months after an arson attack that caused a large-scale blackout in Berlin, police carried out a coordinated raid operation early on Tuesday, March 24.
The September 2025 outage affected almost 50,000 households and thousands of businesses. A claim of responsibility published on the left-wing extremist platform Indymedia by a group calling itself “Some Anarchists” said the attack aimed to expose what it described as the “unspeakable entanglement of research, science and technology with war, environmental destruction and social control.”
Tuesday’s raids saw 17 locations searched in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and the eastern town of Kyritz. The operation targeted four suspects, aged 28, 31, 35, and 36. No arrests were made, but officers seized electronic devices, including mobile phones, laptops and documents.
B.Z.reported that officers raided an “anarchist library” in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. The city’s senator for the interior, Iris Spranger, also told the paper that the searches “demonstrate that we are pursuing every lead with the highest priority.”
Anyone who attacks our critical infrastructure is attacking the security of our entire city. We will not tolerate this.
A separate suspected left-wing extremist arson attack in January left around 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses without power, forcing schools and hospitals to close. It also prompted accusations that the city’s establishment had ignored the threat of left-wing disruption, since plans had been laid out in a pamphlet published months before.
Austrian academic Ralph Schoellhammer said in February that the term “left-wing extremism is a minimisation” when it comes to those behind these blackouts: “It was left-wing terror.”
„Linksextremismus ist verharmlosend – es war Linksterror.“ Über 50.000 Menschen ohne Strom in Berlin, mitten im Winter: ein gezielter Anschlag auf die Infrastruktur. In Schöllhammers Kompass sprechen @ralph_schoelli und @FlorianHartleb über die Rückkehr des Linksterrors,… pic.twitter.com/ahInIfu3Cr
An investigation into the January outage is ongoing. Officials have offered a reward of one million euros for information leading to the perpetrators.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
