As for Italy, the first case on Thursday was that of a Wizz Air flight, departing from Milan Malpensa and bound for Warsaw, Poland, which was forced to land in Vienna, Austria.
Then it was the turn of a Finnair flight headed to Rome Fiumicino airport: it landed as expected, after being escorted by Italian Air Force fighters.
Subsequently, a plane from the Irish company Aer Lingus, which left Dublin and headed for Rome, landed at the Évreux air base in France.
Other cases concerned Milan Malpensa airport for flights arriving from Porto and Thessaloniki, and for one departing for Bucharest.
While today there was an alarm on a flight from Rome which forced a security operation to be carried out this morning at Lisbon airport: the news was spread by CNN Portugal and confirmed by other media. Alarm also for a Wizzair Prague-Rome flight. The flight was diverted to Venice.
The hypothesis is that behind the threats there is coordination at a European level and for this reason international cooperation channels have been activated to identify the servers from which the emails announcing the bombs passed and the IP addresses to trace who sent them. Europol also says it is ready to support the national authorities, upon request. From initial findings, the messages would have arrived from compromised addresses or those that guarantee anonymized services such as Proton mail.
In Italy, according to what has been reconstructed so far, on 5 November the alarms on the Dublin-Rome and Helsinki-Rome flights were triggered by a single anonymous email, written in Italian and sent in the early hours of the morning to Rome Airports and other companies at the Fiumicino airport. The message, with the subject "threat report", indicated the numbers of the two connections and claimed that there were devices on board ready to explode within an hour. The communication ended with the threat "Today your sky will be red." Even in the previous days, emails had been sent in Italian to report alleged bombs on Ryanair flights headed to Rome. The threats were signed by the so-called "Fighters of the Male State", a signature that would refer to the Russian ultranationalist and misogynist movement Muzhskoye Gosudarstvo, also known as Male State.
Polaria and Postal Police investigators are working on the threatening email to trace those responsible with certainty. Once the first information has been sent to the competent prosecutor's offices, and once the documents have been received, the investigation files will be opened. A connection with the false alarms of recent days which affected both flights in various countries and, in Italy, around 280 schools, causing disruption and evacuations of the institutes, cannot be ruled out.
The director of the Postal Police spoke on the topic and explained to Sky TG24: "In collaboration with the other police forces we will try to reconstruct data by data, track by track, until we arrive at those responsible. These are subjects that are difficult to locate. The web is in fact an area in which threats of this type can be carried out anonymously, but it is also the place where computer traces remain: through small electronic clues it is therefore possible to trace those responsible".
Meanwhile, the European Union remains on alert: "Any threat against civilians is unacceptable and the safety of citizens remains a priority", warned the European Transport Commissioner, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, asking national authorities to collaborate with airport managers, airlines and law enforcement agencies. Brussels has activated the European aviation safety information sharing mechanism. The Commission "continues to monitor the situation closely" and is in contact with the Member States concerned and with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), they said yesterday from Brussels. However, the Greek commissioner also called for caution regarding the origin of the reports: "We do not yet have information that allows us to establish whether it is a cyber attack," he said.
