The mysterious story of a German soldier, a faked Syrian identity and a loaded gun in an airport bathroom cracks the door open to a network of far-right extremists inside the German military and the police. They are preparing for the day democracy collapses — a day they call Day X. But just how dangerous are they? See all episodes of Day X at nytimes.com/dayx
Okay, let's go down here.
This is where it happened.
Should we go inside?
Yeah.
One day in January 2017, a maintenance guy was doing his daily round at the Vienna airport.
He walks into a single person bathroom.
Ah, I think this is it.
And opens a small door on the back wall to access some pipes.
And inside, that's where they found the gun.
There's an old black pistol, and it's loaded.
So he takes the gun to the police, and the police set a trap to see who comes to get it.
About two weeks later, someone does.
The man they arrest identifies himself as an officer in the german military.
And after hours of questioning, they let him go.
When they run his fingerprints for a routine check, they come up with a match.
But these fingerprints are not registered to a military officer.
They're registered to a syrian refugee.
This sets off alarm bells and an investigation that eventually spans three countries and multiple intelligence agencies.
And what they find is that in 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees were arriving in Germany, this german military officer disguised himself and managed to fool the authorities into believing he was one of those refugees.
For over a year, he had been living a double life.