More than fifteen European flights receive new bomb threats

European air traffic was once again the target of false bomb threats this Friday. At least 17 flights have received warnings of this type in the last few hours, four of them bound for Madrid. Only in Prague, the Czech capital, nine have been recorded. It is the fourth day of threats since Monday. On Thursday, at least 27 flights were affected, according to Reuters. In total, more than 50 aircraft have been affected this week, and so far no explosives have been found in any aircraft. The governments of Spain and Ireland have already pointed to a coordinated campaign, although neither has pointed out who is responsible. The alerts have also been extended to media outlets in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Bulgaria.

The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has stated on TVE that it cannot be a coincidence that so many incidents with the same modus operandi occur throughout Europe and that the most reasonable hypothesis is that "we are facing an attempt at hybrid aggression and psychological warfare." The Government of Ireland has warned that "it seems likely that this is a coordinated destabilization campaign", although it acknowledges that it is unknown "who is behind it" and whether it is "individuals or a centralized operation." The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has linked the threats to other recent attacks, such as those suffered by some blood banks in France and several supermarket chains in different community countries. "Clearly, they should worry us. The researchers are working and today we are not in a position to say if they are all connected, but surely they all tell us the same thing," added the Italian president.

In Madrid, three of the affected flights were traveling from London and the remaining from Munich. After the deployment of a security device at the Barajas airport, the alerts have been discarded.

A plane with a bomb warning that took off this Friday from Prague bound for Rome finally had to land in Venice. It is one of nine flights departing or arriving in Prague that have received threats in a single day, as confirmed by the airport. Air traffic controllers at the Venice airfield had received a bomb threat through a phone call, according to the Italian agency ANSA. This caused the airport to temporarily close and five other flights to be diverted.

The Czech capital's airport was already one of the most affected on Thursday: four planes that landed there had received threats by email. Bulgaria, which registered several alerts the day before, also reported this Friday that two planes with a bomb threat have landed in Sofia without incident, and that the border police did not find any explosives on them. In Romania, the Armed Forces have escorted three civilian flights with fighters, reports Raúl Sánchez Costa.

Portugal has activated a security device at Lisbon airport for a Ryanair flight originating in Rome. And in Denmark the police have returned to Copenhagen airport for the second consecutive day due to threats against air traffic, although they have not detected any danger to passengers. Many airports have refused to give details about the warnings so as not to encourage new false alerts due to the contagion effect.

A week of alerts

The threats began on Monday, when a Wizz Air plane flying from London to Sofia diverted to Budapest escorted by a Hungarian fighter jet. On Tuesday, seven flights received warnings. The largest wave arrived on Thursday, with at least 27 aircraft affected. To give a measure of the volume, this data: the State Aviation Safety Agency (AESA) registered 29 events related to bomb threats in Spain in all of 2024, according to its annual security report.

This Friday, threats against the media were added to the alerts on flights. The Irish public television station RTE has evacuated its headquarters in Donnybrook, in Dublin, after receiving an email in the morning warning that a bomb would explode in 45 minutes. The message also threatened to attack planes, cruise ships, subway stations and trains, according to what a presenter from the network read on the air. Irish police have searched the building with dogs and declared it safe.

A journalist from the network has assured Reuters that the email that triggered the alarm claimed to come from the same extremist group that claimed responsibility for one of the bomb threats against the airports in Rome and Milan the day before. In the United Kingdom, Sky has reported that it has also received a threat to its security. In Bulgaria, the Nova network has received emails signed by a certain “Mikhail Andropov”, under the title “Message to the West”, which presented the threats as the beginning of a series of attacks against transport in Europe, according to Reuters, which has not been able to establish who sent them or if they are related to the threats to flights.

Thursday's email, written in Italian, which reached airlines and operators at the Fiumicino (Rome) and Malpensa (Milan) airports, claimed that devices had been placed on two flights from Helsinki and Dublin, which would explode in 60 minutes. At Sofia airport they also received the same email, although written in Bulgarian, the country's state news agency reported. It threatened three flights.

Peter Lehr, professor of terrorism studies at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), explains that this use of “standardized templates” points to a single actor or set of actors for at least part of the threats, although he does not rule out that there are also imitators.

The emails were signed by “fighters of the Male State”, who presented the action as an attack against the Italian “feminist regime”. Male State is a misogynist and ultranationalist movement founded in Russia in 2016 by blogger Vladislav Pozdniakov. Russian justice declared it an extremist in 2021 and, later, the group supported the invasion of Ukraine. Pozdniakov assured Reuters this Friday that the group no longer exists and has no relationship with the threats. A Telegram account linked to the movement has mocked the accusation in response to a BBC Russian query.

It is not the first time that the name of the movement has been used. In 2022, the Government of Montenegro received an email signed by Pozdniakov threatening to blow up all the schools in the country. The founder of the group denied having a relationship with him on Telegram and assured that someone was using his name.

Rhys Jones, an analyst at aviation security consultancy Osprey Flight Solutions, cautions against concluding that this group is responsible for the wave of bomb threats. According to Jones, these movements frequently fragment and the person signing the emails could be a split from the original that emerged outside of Russia. It also points to networks known as The Com, born in the United States, which have sent false notices to the police and false bomb threats.