European flight bomb threats, Digi Mart USA News: Hoax bomb threats have caused at least 34 flights across Europe to be disrupted, with some forced to make emergency landings, as questions mount over an apparently coordinated effort to cause chaos for travelers.
The series of warnings on Thursday affected flights between Italy, Ireland, the UK, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, France, Greece, Serbia and Czechia. The threats affected flights operated by Ryanair, Aer Lingus, Wizz Air, Finnair, easyJet, Aegean Airlines, Iberia, Sky Express, Air Serbia and LOT Polish Airlines.
All landed safely, and searches of the planes found nothing suspicious.
In the UK, Heathrow, London’s principal airport, and Birmingham airport received threats overnight, which were determined to be hoaxes with the help of specialist investigators from the Metropolitan Police’s aviation police command. The Met said threats had been made against four aircraft departing from or arriving at Heathrow.
A police spokesperson added that, after an assessment, “no security issues [were] identified.”
The day of hoaxes followed similar threats on Tuesday, when seven planes across Europe were searched or diverted after malicious alerts. On Monday, a flight from the UK to Bulgaria was diverted after a threat that was apparently without substance.
In total, at least 33 flights have been affected this week.
Investigators said on Thursday there remained no evidence that the hoaxes were being orchestrated by a hostile terror group or state actor, such as Russia or Iran, although inquiries across Europe continue. The global airlines body IATA condemned the disruption and urged authorities to identify the origin of the threats.
“Safety is the number one priority for the industry and we take all threats seriously,” said Nick Careen, IATA’s senior vice-president for operations, safety and security, in a statement.
The EU transport commissioner, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, said it was too early to know if the incidents were linked, but that any threats against civilians were unacceptable.
Bomb threats emailed to airports in Rome and Sofia were signed “fighters of the Male State,” according to sources at Aeroporti di Roma, which manages the city’s two airports, and a text seen by Agence France-Presse. Male State is a Russian far-right, ultranationalist and misogynistic movement founded in 2016 by Vladislav Pozdnyakov.
On his Telegram channel, Pozdnyakov, a prominent supporter of the war in Ukraine, did not comment on or claim responsibility for the bomb threats.
The emails reportedly read: “We, the fighters of the Male State, will make history with our actions today. Your feminist regime will remember this forever.
The explosion will occur in 60 minutes. Today, your skies will turn red.”
A Cork airport spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that the airport had received an anonymous threat by phone on Thursday morning, causing a flight to be delayed. It was understood to be a Ryanair flight from London Stansted.
A separate Ryanair flight from Pescara in Italy to Brussels-Charleroi was inspected after the word “bomb” was found scrawled on the walls of its onboard toilet.
The affected flights had knock-on effects but were a tiny fraction of the 27,400 flights scheduled in Europe on Thursday, according to the European air traffic control agency, Eurocontrol. The pilot of an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome that diverted to Évreux was being questioned by French authorities for initially refusing to land at a military base, according to French media reports.
The disruption followed cyberattacks this week against supermarket refrigeration systems. A Kremlin spokesperson said on Thursday it was “absurd” to blame Vladimir Putin’s administration for the fridge hacks.
“We have such baseless accusations against our country, implicating it in everything,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
In Rome, Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said: “It seems to me that every day now, from refrigerators to blood supplies in France, to these fake alarms, there’s someone who has an interest in stoking tensions.” Asked if he knew who was behind the hoaxes, he said: “It’s called ‘under-threshold warfare’ because it’s below the attribution threshold. It’s done that way on purpose, so no one can pin the blame.”
Many of the affected flights were operated by low-cost carriers, but there was little discernible pattern surrounding the incidents. Aviation experts say fake threats occur daily, but such a number of credible threats, even if malicious hoaxes, appears to point to coordinated action.
While getting a large explosive onboard should be ruled out by multiple layers of security and screening, the effects of any detonation would be multiplied for planes at a typical cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Diversions are expensive as well as highly disruptive, but airlines have little choice in the face of any remotely credible threat.
The ready availability of airline operations information on the internet means any hoaxer now has a level of detail about schedules, aircraft types and technical specifications that would have eluded all but insiders decades ago.
Rhys Jones, an analyst at Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation intelligence firm, said airlines’ confidence in European airport security should not mean any change to normal protocols after the hoaxes, but “one of the natural responses will be to see doubled-down security, media coverage and public concern about travelling.” He said the threats seemed linked but described them as “a reasonably chaotic campaign with no particular region targeted.” While they could weaken future security responses through the normalization of threats, simply creating disruption could be regarded as a success by those carrying out the hoaxes.
