Around ten flights to Europe targeted by bomb threats this Tuesday

A strange epidemic of false alarms has hit air travel in recent hours. Around ten commercial flights in Europe were targeted on Tuesday by bomb threats which turned out to be false, according to the authorities of the countries concerned.

At least four alerts concerned flights of the Irish company Ryanair: one linking Manchester (England) to Murcia (Spain), one Lisbon-Rome, one Dublin-Rome and one Dublin-Sofia. Asked by AFP, Ryanair did not immediately react to this information.

Two flights to Warsaw - one from the Scandinavian company SAS from Copenhagen and another from the Polish company LOT from London-Heathrow - were also targeted, as well as a Wizz Air flight linking Bergamo (Italy) to Sofia. British police told AFP that they had been informed of “threats” targeting “four planes due to take off or land at Heathrow Airport” on Tuesday morning, as well as an alert targeting a plane in Manchester, without detailing which flights they were. All planes were inspected upon landing, without any suspicious devices being discovered.

These incidents occur the day after an alert on a Wizz Air flight departing from Luton airport in England and bound for Sofia, which had to land urgently in Budapest, escorted by two Hungarian fighter planes. On Tuesday, two Ryanair flights were subject to mine clearance operations upon their arrival at Rome-Fiumicino after “an anonymous report concerning a suspected bomb threat”, according to a spokesperson for Rome Airports. The first landed around 9:40 a.m. (08:40 GMT) and the second, coming from Dublin, around 10:45 a.m., was escorted by the Italian air force, according to the same source.

An SAS flight connecting Copenhagen to Warsaw Chopin Airport was also subject to security checks after landing, following “information about the presence of a dangerous object on board the aircraft,” airport spokesperson Piotr Rudzki told AFP. An airstrip was temporarily closed, before the airport resumed normal operations around 12:20 p.m. local time (11:20 a.m. GMT), he said.

A LOT aircraft, coming from London-Heathrow and initially expected at Warsaw-Chopin, had to be diverted to Warsaw-Modlin airport, according to a spokesperson for this airport, which was briefly closed to traffic. Spanish police, for their part, carried out checks on arrival around 10:30 a.m. (09:30 GMT) in Murcia of a Ryanair flight from Manchester, which had been the target of a similar alert, according to Spanish airport operator Aena.

Two planes bound for Sofia were inspected for the same reasons, according to Bulgarian authorities: a Wizz Air flight from Bergamo when it landed at 11:10 a.m. (09:10 GMT), as well as a Ryanair flight from Dublin, landing around 1:30 p.m. (11:30 GMT). Again, no suspicious device was found. A spokeswoman for the Bulgarian border police told AFP that these two bomb threats had been sent by email to the Interior Ministry.