Manhunt in Berlin after bag with explosives abandoned at train station

German police are searching for a man who abandoned a bag of explosives at a train station in Berlin and fled after being stopped by officers.

Police said they had attempted to stop the man for a routine ID check at the Neukölln station in the German capital on Wednesday afternoon. He ran away and explosives were found in the backpack he left behind, Berlin’s police force said in a post on X.

The explosive material was taken to a nearby park, where experts detonated it on Wednesday evening, according to the post.

The manhunt is ongoing, although police said on Thursday they had not yet been able to identify the suspect and that the circumstances behind the incident were unclear.

The bag contained the highly explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which has been used in extremist attacks on the public in Germany, according to local media.

Dirk Wiese, a lawmaker from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD party, told the newspaper Rheinische Post that the police had been “able to thwart an attack”.

“This clearly shows how high the terror threat is in our country,” he said.