Manhunt after explosives left at Berlin train station

German police were searching for a man after he fled a police check at a busy Berlin railway station and left behind a bag containing explosives.

Officers approached the man for a routine check in the capital's Neukoelln station at around 3.30pm yesterday afternoon, police said in a statement.

The man, who was carrying a cloth bag, started to run away and one of the officers attempted to detain him.

"He was able to get out of the officer's grip, dropped the bag and fled across the tracks," the police said.

The bag contained a package wrapped in tape, the contents of which were later identified as explosives.

The police cordoned off a section of a local park and dug a hole in the ground to carry out a controlled explosion at around 7.50pm.

Nobody was injured and there was no danger to local residents.

The police said they were carrying out "search measures to identify and arrest the escaped man, including the evaluation of video recordings".

It was still unclear why the man was carrying explosives, they added.

The Bild daily reported that the bag contained "a grey substance, a plastic bottle wrapped with wires and a paper bag with more cables".

The substance was the highly explosive TATP, which has been used in several high-profile Islamist attacks, the Bild said.

"If this explosive device had gone off in the vicinity of a group of people, it would have had dramatic consequences," Berlin's BZ newspaper quoted a police officer as saying.

Dirk Wiese, a politician from Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party, said police "were obviously able to thwart an attack".

"This clearly shows how high the terror threat is in our country," he told the Rheinische Post newspaper.