A police officer mistakenly shot at troops taking part in a large-scale Bundeswehr training exercise in the southern German city of Erding, injuring a soldier.
Apparently it was the military police that started firing with blanks, but regardless of if it was a regular soldier or not, what training scenario were they doing that required them shooting on local police and doing that in a residential area? Civil war?
As reported the days before (translated from German):
According to the Bundeswehr, the deployed forces are to train operations against threats behind a fictional front line, in what is referred to as the “rear area.” This includes scenarios involving drones, sabotage, or so-called “irregular forces,” meaning armed fighters not belonging to a state army. The assumption is that a NATO member state is attacked, and the alliance must respond to defend it.
Training will also focus on tasks such as working at crime scenes, directing traffic, locating weapon caches, combating illegal arms trade, and protecting critical infrastructure, for example, at the decommissioned Isar 2 nuclear power plant. Soldiers will also practice defending against enemy drones and deploying their own.
I was an MP and they had similar scenarios for us. Unmarked forces in odd uniforms, fighting in residential and industrial areas, tunnels and infrastructure targets.
Usually though we didn’t fire guns with civilians around and police knew we were around.
What I read is that because they were training for a scenario not at the front, the person who shot the blanks believed the person shooting the real bullets was part of the scenario.
Let’s hope he for some understandable reason thought was ‘the enemy is using police uniforms’ and not ‘the police chose the side of the enemy’. Clearly the threat they practice for is a Russian invasion, not a civil uprising.
Apparently it was the military police that started firing with blanks, but regardless of if it was a regular soldier or not, what training scenario were they doing that required them shooting on local police and doing that in a residential area? Civil war?
As reported the days before (translated from German):
Ok, and how does that scenario involve having to shoot on clearly marked local police forces?
Local police was involved in the exercise. So the soldier likely mistook the arriving police force as part of the exercise, when they were not.
I suggest waiting for the report of the official investigation.
I was an MP and they had similar scenarios for us. Unmarked forces in odd uniforms, fighting in residential and industrial areas, tunnels and infrastructure targets.
Usually though we didn’t fire guns with civilians around and police knew we were around.
What I read is that because they were training for a scenario not at the front, the person who shot the blanks believed the person shooting the real bullets was part of the scenario.
Let’s hope he for some understandable reason thought was ‘the enemy is using police uniforms’ and not ‘the police chose the side of the enemy’. Clearly the threat they practice for is a Russian invasion, not a civil uprising.
Note that not wearing your own uniform is a warcrime.
Note also that Russia has done this basically nonstop since 2014.