Explosives Threat leads to Germany Holland Match cancellation

The events kicked off after German authorities said they received “concrete information” about a bomb threat at the HDI Arena leading to the global friendly being cancelled.

“That is why I do not want to give away any knowledge and only say from my point of view, that the decision to cancel the match was the right thing to do”.

He said in a televised press conference: “We were all looking forward to the game, which was a special gesture of football and this makes it all the more bitter to have to take this decision, which was particularly hard to take, but in the slightest doubt, our priority was to protect people”.

The stadium was evacuated by police about 90 minutes before kick-off in the northern German city.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and several cabinet ministers were expected to attend the match, which comes four days after the terrorist attacks in Paris, which over 130 people. The “official visitors” and the teams are safe, he said, adding that the evacuation of the stadium went “smoothly”.

“The first vice-president of the DFB has a lot of tasks but he is not the official speaker of the police department”, Koch said. We need to position ourselves accordingly in this respect. “We have to be aware that there are risky situations”, Koch said.

Dagmar Freitag, president of the sports committee of the German parliament, said the Hannover incident will “surely have an influence” on sports events and the Bundesliga but that “we’ll have to react in a level-headed way”. “We took them seriously and that is why we took the measures”.

Germany players had to overcome two scares in less than a week.

On Friday, Germany was playing France in Paris’ Stade de France, outside of which three suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing one bystander. The team spent the night at the stadium before flying home.

Saints player Jordy Clasie was named in the Dutch squad for the match before it was cancelled.

Head coach Joachim Loew had called Tuesday’s planned match “a clear message and symbol of freedom and a demonstration of compassion, as well as sorrow, for our French friends – not only in France, but throughout the world”.