Berlin police looking into device disabled at residence housing Russian media
Berlin criminal investigators and prosecutors were on Saturday (May 7) investigating after a device was found and destroyed at a residential building housing Russian news agency staff in the city's Steglitz district, police said.
The device was found on Friday and investigators are looking into whether it was dangerous and whom it was aimed at, a Berlin police spokesman said in response to an enquiry.
Office chief of the Russian media group, Rossiya Segodnya, Sergey Feoktistov, who lives at the property with his wife said they found the device after cleaning up debris from a bottle thrown through the window.
"There was an attack on our building. There have been dozens of cases which we have reported to the police. And the most recent one, you can see, there is a hole in the window that was made by a thrown bottle. So we called the police and they were here very quickly and looked at everything and said everything was fine and drove away. So we then wanted to clean up and get rid of the bits of the bottle and generally clear up the mess from the property. And then my wife found something at the cellar window - if you call it that in German - she found a device which looked a bit strange. It was a canister with tape around it and various cables," Feoktistov said outside the house.
"And then the bomb disposal people tried for a couple of hours to look into it and then there was a short sharp explosion," Feoktistov added.
A police press release confirmed that a beer bottle had been thrown at the building and said a suspicious object had been found during an inspection of the building.
Police confirmed that the object had been destroyed at the scene.
Feoktistov said that there may have been inflammably involved, there was no police confirmation as of Saturday evening as to what the device was.
Feoktistov said this was not the first incidence in the area and that police were helping with measures to protect staff.
"Of course, we don't feel particularly safe but we are trying to take measures to make the staff, the journalists and family members of our journalists safer. That's all I can say. And the police are also doing everything possible to have such a thing happen in such a quiet district of Berlin!" he said.
Video footage broadcast by RIA on Friday evening showed a cordoned-off street and a person in a protective suit, which the agency said was one of the sappers working to defuse the bomb.