German Chancellor Olaf Scholz tried Friday to relativize a breach in his security, which saw a person approach him and hug him this week on an airport runway, an incident deemed unacceptable by his interior minister. "For people to say hello and greet me, it's not something that impresses me, it's quite normal and I didn't feel this situation as dramatic," Scholz told a news conference during a visit to Tallinn, Estonia. "The police are doing a good job, I feel safe," he tried to reassure.
His own interior minister, Nancy Faeser, has been less diplomatic about police work. and the Chancellor's Close Protection Team. "Such an incident must not happen," she told reporters Friday during a trip. "The people concerned will now look very precisely at what happened, what mistakes were made, so that it does not happen again in the future," she added.
Intrusion under the influence of narcotics
The facts date back to Wednesday evening on a runway at Frankfurt airport. The chancellor was returning from an event at the European Central Bank and had just entered the tarmac with his government convoy. The police did not see that a man followed the convoy without permission and that he too entered the area to be forbidden to him.
When the chancellor got out of his car, the man in his fifties approached him, shook his hand and hugged him. He was then arrested by security and the prosecutor's office opened an investigation. According to Der Spiegel magazine, the intruder appears to have been under the influence of narcotics.