Image source: Reuters
At least 21 aircraft and several airports across Europe have been targeted with bomb threats in the second such incident this week, with the UK calling it a "malicious hoax".
Flights to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Poland and Romania are affected. An Aer Lingus plane from Dublin to Rome was diverted to an air base in France, while Italian fighter jets escorted a Finnair flight from Helsinki to Rome.
EasyJet announced that the police in Prague received its flights from Newcastle and Glasgow as a precaution. London Heathrow and Birmingham airports received threats that were assessed as not credible.
No explosives were found during the inspections, and it is not clear whether these incidents, some of which were claimed by an unknown group, are related to each other.
Airport authorities in the Italian capital, Rome, stated that the false threat targeting two incoming flights on Thursday had been received via email.
The warnings were signed by a group or individual calling themselves “combatants of the male state,” claiming that they are targeting a “feminist system” and that they seek to “leave their mark on history.”
They also threatened to "dye the sky red" with bombings.
These details were first reported by Italian media, then confirmed to the BBC by Rome Airports, which manages the capital's two airports.
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It is likely that the name “Fighters of the Masculine State” refers to the Russian group “Male Legion”; It is a far-right group whose members' views were so extreme that a Moscow court banned it in 2021. However, the group retained tens of thousands of followers online, where it supported Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine the following year.
But this email, even if real, is unlikely to provide the leads police and airport authorities need to uncover who is behind these false threats, or determine their motives.
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British Transport Minister Heidi Alexander described Thursday's events as "false and malicious threats."
She said that the government takes "these threats seriously," stressing that there are "well-established procedures to deal with false and malicious threats."
A British government spokesman later said that the threats reported "in the early hours" of the day had been "settled," without providing further details.
For its part, Heathrow Airport said in a statement that it had received a threat earlier today, but it was “deemed not credible,” adding that “there is no danger to passengers, employees or aircraft.”
The statement noted that there are “robust aviation security standards in the UK, aimed at safely assessing and managing such situations.”
In a related context, a spokesman for Birmingham Airport told the BBC that the airport received a threat, following which “the approved procedures were immediately followed, in coordination with emergency services and relevant partners.”
The threats targeted the following flights on Thursday:
Emily Noble, who was on board an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome, said she was about an hour into her flight when passengers were informed of a "technical" problem.
The 26-year-old woman, from Dublin, stated in a statement to the BBC Fact-Finding Team that later, as the plane began to turn in preparation for an unplanned landing in France, the pilot explained that the matter was related to a “security” issue.
Noble described the atmosphere on board the plane as a “strange experience,” saying: “The situation was worrying because we did not know what was happening, but we all tried to remain as calm as possible.”
Noble added that she was able to hear the sounds of fighter planes during the landing, and saw one of them landing behind their plane.
After landing at the Evreux-Fauville air base in the Normandy region, passengers learned that the flight was the target of a bomb threat.
Image source: Emily Noble
Noble said that the passengers remained on board the plane for two and a half hours, while police and army personnel conducted searches, including the use of police dogs trained to detect explosives.
Later, the passengers were informed that they would be transferred to an airport in Paris, from where another plane would take them to Rome.
Philip Boom, professor of aviation security at Coventry University, said that the aviation sector "faces bomb threats on an almost daily basis", but he expressed his "astonishment" at the incidents that occurred this week.
He explained that diverting any flight only occurs “when the threat is credible, and the authorities believe there is a real possibility of an explosive device on board the plane.”
He added that the concern is that "if false threats are repeated, a sense of complacency may creep in, leading to a real threat being ignored; or these threats may simply be a distraction."
For his part, Marco Chan, an aviation expert at Kingston University, told the BBC that these threats “are most likely false, but it is right for the regime to treat them as real.”
He pointed out that some experts see these incidents as “a possible part of a pattern aimed at causing cheap disruptions to air traffic, with the possibility of disavowing responsibility for them.”
He added that false threats may also be the result of imitation by others, but "three days of incidents is too short a period to distinguish between whether it was coordinated or simply a phenomenon transmitted by imitation."
Two days ago, seven European flights - including two from the United Kingdom - were subjected to inspections following bomb threats, and no explosives were found on board any of them.
On Monday, a Hungarian fighter plane accompanied a Wizz Air flight, which was heading from London Luton Airport to Sofia, until it landed in Budapest, after receiving a bomb threat while the plane was in the air.
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