Bomb threats have caused diversions and emergency landings for at least 15 flights across Europe , renewing questions about a possibly coordinated effort to disrupt travel.
The series of warnings on Thursday morning affected flights between Italy, Ireland, the UK, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Greece and Czechia.
They came two days after seven planes across Europe were searched or diverted because of malicious hoax bomb alerts. On Monday a flight from the UK to Bulgaria was diverted after a threat that was apparently without substance.
The latest alerts affected flights by Ryanair, Aer Lingus, WizzAir, FinnAir and LOT. All landed safely. Initial searches of some of the planes found nothing suspicious.
Two Ryanair flights from Copenhagen and Madrid to Sofia made emergency landings in the Bulgarian capital while a Ryanair flight from London to Sofia was diverted and landed at Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city.
“Upon landing, the necessary inspections were carried out in accordance with the applicable procedures and no issues were identified,” said a Bulgarian government spokesperson. “Airport operations at both Sofia airport and Plovdiv airport have returned to normal.”
An Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome diverted to the Evreux military airbase in northern France. A WizzAir flight from Milan to Warsaw diverted to Vienna, while a Ryanair flight from Porto and an Aegean Air flight from Thessaloniki, both to Milan, were searched upon arrival at Milan’s Malpensa airport.
Also affected were a LOT Polish Airlines flight from Warsaw to Brussels, two FinnAir flights from Helsinki to Rome and Vienna and four flights by other airlines to Prague.
“ Security measures at Prague airport have just ended, with pyrotechnic inspections yielding negative results,” said a Czech police spokesperson.
The threats against the FinnAir flights were “unfounded or hoax”, said an airline representative. “Unfortunately, air traffic is sometimes subject to threats, as we have seen this week, when also other airlines in Europe have faced hoax bomb threats. Threats are almost always unfounded.”
The travel disruption followed cyber-attacks this week against supermarket refrigeration systems . Some analysts speculate the disruption, along with drone incursions and triggering of app alerts, is part of a hybrid campaign to unsettle Europe on behalf of Iran, Russia or other state actors.
A Kremlin spokesperson said on Thursday it was “absurd” to blame Vladimir Putin’s administration for the hackers who targeted fridges. “We have such baseless accusations against our country, implicating it in everything,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Many of the affected flights on Thursday were operated by low-cost carriers but there was little discernible pattern surrounding the incidents.
The Italian news agency Ansa, citing police sources, said the warning for the Helsinki-Rome and Dublin-Rome flights came from an anonymous email written in Italian and sent to the Rome airport company, ADR, and other affiliated companies. The subject heading was “segnalazione minaccia” (“threat warning”).
Aviation experts say fake threats occur daily but that such a multiplicity of threats is unusual.
