By Sabine Siebold
BERLIN (Reuters) -The German military is setting up rapid response teams to counter acute drone threats, a top German military official said, most recently dispatching these experts to assist in Belgium.
“These anti-drone units are being established right now,” Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank, who heads Germany’s joint operations command and oversees the country’s defence planning, told Reuters in an interview.
The German defence ministry said late on Thursday it was sending counter-drone experts to Belgium after a request from the country, which has been struggling with an increase in drone sightings near military installations and civilian airports.
DRONE SIGHTINGS CAUSE HEADACHES ACROSS EUROPE
“An advance party of air force personnel have arrived in Belgium to explore the situation and coordinate a temporary mission involving drone detection and counter-drone capabilities with the Belgian forces,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The main party will follow shortly.”
Sightings of drones over airports and military bases have become a constant problem in Belgium in recent days and have caused major disruptions across Europe in recent months.
They forced the temporary closures of airports in several countries including Sweden on Thursday.
Some officials have blamed the incidents on “hybrid warfare” by Russia. Moscow has denied any connection with the incidents.
Sollfrank declined to go into detail when talking about the new counter-drone units, citing operational security, but said a team sent to Copenhagen last month during an EU summit had been equipped with a mix of sensors and effectors.
“They have various systems to spot and counter drones. We have the option, for example, to assume control over a drone and land it at a specific location,” said the general.
The counter-drone experts also have drones at their disposal that can eject nets to catch drones and thus take them down, as well as interceptors that ram hostile drones, he added.
BELGIUM AIRPORTS LATEST TO SPOT DRONES
Belgium’s Liege airport resumed flights after a temporary halt due to a drone sighting on Friday, in the second such incident this week.
Drones spotted flying over airports in the capital, Brussels, and in Liege, in the country’s east, forced the diversion of many incoming planes and the grounding of some due to depart on Tuesday.
The Belgian government called an emergency meeting of key government ministers and security chiefs on Thursday to address what the defence minister called a coordinated attack.
(Reporting by Sabine Siebold, Editing by Miranda Murray and Alex Richardson)
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