Travellers were instructed not to go to Hamburg airport on Sunday morning because of an ongoing “hostage situation”.

The airport in the northern part of the city had been closed to passengers and all flights had been cancelled since Saturday night when an armed man broke through an airport gate with his vehicle and fired twice into the air with a weapon, according to German news agency dpa.

Authorities said they had been previously contacted by the man’s wife about a possible child abduction.

Police said that the 35-year-old man had his four-year-old daughter inside the car whom he had reportedly taken by force from the mother in a possible custody battle. He wants to take the child to Turkey, German tabloid Bild reported.

The car with the man and child inside was parked under a Turkish Airlines plane, a police spokesman said.

A psychologist had been negotiating with the man in Turkish for hours and there was no indication other people could be harmed since all passengers had been evacuated from the airport, including those on the Turkish Airlines, jet police said.