This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A Christmas market was evacuated in the German city of Potsdam on Friday after a nail-packed device was found in a nearby shop.

Brandenburg’s interior minister, Karl-Heinz Schröter, said the package left at a pharmacy contained nails and a powder, which was being analysed to determine whether it was an explosive.



Germany is on high alert for potential terrorist attacks nearly a year after a Tunisian Islamist hijacked a truck, killed its driver and rammed the vehicle into a Christmas market in nearby Berlin, killing 11 people there.

“There was a successful attempt to spread fear, because at this point it isn’t possible for Christmas festivities to go ahead as normal’, said Schröter, a member of the Social Democratic party and the interior minister of the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin. He said the area would remain shut while police searched with sniffer dogs for any other packages.

He told reporters that several hundred grams of nails had been found in a metal cylinder inside the package, but added: “We just don’t know at this point if this was a device that could have actually exploded, or a fake, or a test.”



A robot using water jets was used to ensure the device was safe, officials said. Potsdam police said x-rays had shown wires, nails and batteries inside the package, but that no detonator had been found.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police at Potsdam’s Christmas market. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The device was described by the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten newspaper as a package measuring 40cm by 50cm that had been delivered to the pharmacy. The newspaper said police were alerted at about 2.30pm local time (1.30pm GMT) after an employee opened the package and saw suspicious wires and electronics inside.

Christmas markets opened across Germany on Monday at the start of the holiday season, fortified with security staff and concrete barriers to protect shoppers. The country has about 2,600 markets, filled with sparkling Christmas trees and wooden stalls serving candied nuts, sausages, mulled wine and handicrafts.

Potsdam’s mayor, Jann Jacobs, said it was likely that the Christmas market would reopen tomorrow.



The German interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, this week said Germany had increased information sharing between state and federal officials and taken other steps to increase security after a series of missteps on the Berlin case.

A spokesman from his ministry said this week that the risk of an attack in Europe and Germany was “continuously high”.