“In the greed for energy, the earth is being depleted, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, burned down, raped, destroyed,” the group, which is listed by Berlin’s intelligence services as a left-wing extremist organization, said in the letter.
“The aim of the action is to cause significant damage to the gas industry and the greed for energy,” its authors wrote. The group has used similar means to communicate in the past, and Berlin police believed the letter to be genuine.
With temperatures below freezing in the German capital, schools and kindergartens in the southern districts affected by the power outage remained closed on Monday morning. Around 30,000 households and approximately 1,700 businesses were still without power on the third day of the power outage. Full restoration of supply is expected to take until Thursday.
The city’s energy senator, Franziska Giffey told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook Podcast on Monday that Berlin’s critical infrastructure needed better protection.
“There is a great deal of public information about our critical infrastructure that we need to publish and make transparent. In the future, we will have to consider how we can handle this differently and how we can protect ourselves even better against these issues,” she said.
In a separate interview with Berlin’s public broadcaster rbb, Giffey said prosecutors at the national level would need to assist with the investigation.