Spelling errors led to ‘terrorist threat’ evacuation at German rock festival – police

‘German police have admitted that the mass evacuation of 87,000 festival-goers at a music festival earlier this month was due to two spelling mistakes that led authorities to falsely believe radical Islamists were working at the event.
The “Rock am Ring” festival was evacuated on its first day, June 2, because two employees of a company that had been subcontracted to set up stages at the festival were spelled wrong.
Those simple misspellings led authorities to suspect the employees could have been radical Islamists, prompting the evacuation of 87,000 festival-goers.
“The names of the suspects were written incorrectly, but they exhibited a phonetic similarity to the actual names (of terror suspects),” Rhineland-Palatinate chief of police Johannes Kunz told Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, as cited by The Local.
“At the time, the situation was very serious – we couldn’t rule out that an attack was being prepared,” he added.’
Read more: Spelling errors led to ‘terrorist threat’ evacuation at German rock festival – police