The fire at the Starlink station

On the evening of 23 September 2026, a fire broke out at a Starlink ground station in Wola Krobowska in Grójec County, Masovia. The site is run by Exatel and carries internet traffic through Poland, including traffic bound for Ukraine, according to Polish reporting. Rzeczpospolita reports that surveillance footage shows two men climbing a fence at 20:57, pouring an accelerant over a control cabinet and setting it alight. Bild, as cited by Deutsche Welle, reported that the station briefly stopped working before coming back online, and no injuries were reported. On 25 September, two days after the fire, a prosecutor from the Mazovian branch of Poland's National Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation into sabotage and a terrorist-type offence carried out for a foreign intelligence service.

Arrests in Germany

On Monday, 12 October, German police detained two Turkish nationals at the railway station in Nürtingen, near Stuttgart. Stuttgart prosecutors said Poland accuses the pair of carrying out the arson attack on a satellite internet terminal on 23 September on behalf of a foreign secret service. On Tuesday, 13 October, an investigating judge at the Nürtingen district court reviewed the European arrest warrants issued by Poland and ordered both men held in pretrial custody while the extradition question is decided. Baden-Württemberg interior minister Manuel Hagel confirmed the arrests and said three flats had been searched, two of them in Baden-Württemberg. He also confirmed that a witness had been identified at the arrest scene, a woman whose details were taken and who may have supported the perpetrators.

The arrests widened on 13 October. RMF FM, citing anonymous sources, reported that a woman and a man had also been detained, bringing the total to four. Reports differ on where the woman was taken, with the Schwäbische Zeitung naming Karlsruhe while Le Soir and Frankfurter Allgemeine place an arrest in Berlin. According to RMF FM, the woman was to have driven the two men from the area of Łódź to Masovia, and the man's role is still being examined. A Mini Clubman with German registration plates, reportedly driven by a Turkish woman, carried the men on their journey into Poland.

Polish allegations and police handling

Rzeczpospolita reports that Polish police held both men on 24 September but released them despite doubts about their passports. The same outlet reports that Polish investigators believe the pair acted on orders from Russian intelligence. One of the men left a fingerprint at the scene, and a mobile phone carried by one of them connected to nearby base stations, which helped investigators reconstruct the route to Poland and back to Germany. At a press conference on Monday, Polish police chief Marek Boroń described the suspects' status in Germany.

One of the perpetrators is a resident in Germany, and the other, a Turk, had been ordered to leave Germany.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced the arrests of the two Turkish citizens on 12 October. On 13 October he said there was evidence that the attack had been ordered by Russian intelligence and wrote on X that the suspected saboteurs would have to answer before Polish justice.

Reactions from Berlin

Hagel used the case to call for a reform of German security services, saying it was time to wake from a 'Dornröschenschlaf', or deep slumber, and that foreign states were increasingly attacking. He did not elaborate on the legal consequences of such a reform, nor on possible links to Russia or organised crime at this early stage.

We are in a very early phase of the investigation.

At the Warsaw Security Forum, German foreign minister Johann Wadephul called for closer European cooperation against such attacks. He said the attacks were happening not only in Ukraine but across Europe, according to dpa. Earlier that day he had held talks with his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski.

We are in the crosshairs of Russia.

What comes next

The extradition decision now rests with the courts, and the Oberlandesgericht would take over the case if extradition proceedings begin. Polish police and the national prosecutor's office did not respond immediately to questions from AFP. The station remained operational after the fire, according to Le Soir, and it is one of the links carrying internet traffic through Poland to Ukraine.