A days-long manhunt concluded on Tuesday with the arrest at a police checkpoint near a power station of 48-year-old 'Daniel V' — his full name not having been published in accordance with German privacy laws for criminal suspects — over a series of what have been called "climate terrorism" attacks against the national power network.

The man was arrested after trying to avoid a police checkpoint near the Weisweiler coal power station. He offered no resistance to officers but was wearing a backpack containing explosives. A concealed tent was subsequently discovered nearby which was "rigged" with explosives.

Attacks took place at at least half a dozen high voltage power sites across three German states, and police are seeking to discover other hitherto undetected attempts to sabotage the power grid.

German broadcaster NTV states the remarkable means of attack allegedly devised by the suspect is to use home-made rockets to carry a lightweight wire from the ground and over high-voltage power lines. Once the rocket falls to the ground, this wire would be slung over the power lines, grounding the equipment and potentially causing a catastrophic failure. Bright flashes of blue-white light were observed at the sites of some attacks as the high voltage electricity arced to the ground.

The locations chosen for these assaults — directly next to brown coal (lignite)-fired power stations — appears to have been chosen to cause the power stations themselves to 'trip' and shut down. In one such attack, more than 20 rockets are said to have been fired at a substation Turnow-Preilack substation near the Jänschwalde power plant in Brandenburg, causing two short circuits, but no local grid failure.

Dutch broadcaster NOS reports there was a "brief interruption" in power supply after a large-scale outage at another unspecified coal-fired power plant over the past week linked to these attacks, and part of the Bergheim power plant west of Cologne was knocked out "for several days" after another high voltage shorting attack with rockets.

The manhunt for Daniel V commenced last week amid the spate of attacks after several German newspapers received handwritten letters of confession containing a political manifesto, stating the sabotage was being launched because "generating electricity from fossil fuels is a crime" and because of alleged German complicity in "the genocide in Palestine". The letters are reported to have not disguised the identity of the author, contained details of the attacks that were not yet in the public domain, and a raid on the author's home last week in the course of the hunt also discovered home-made explosives.