At least 21 aircraft and several airports across Europe have been targeted by bomb threats in the second such incident this week, with the UK calling it a "malicious hoax". Flights to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Poland and Romania were affected. An Aer Lingus plane from Dublin to Rome was diverted to an air base in France and Italian fighter jets escorted Finnair's Helsinki-Rome flight.
EasyJet said its flights from Newcastle and Glasgow were met by police in Prague as a precaution. London Heathrow and Birmingham airports received threats that were assessed as not credible. No explosives have been found during searches, and it is not clear if the incidents, some claimed by a little known group, are related.
The airport authorities in Italy's capital Rome said the hoax threat against two inbound flights received on Thursday had come by email. The warnings were signed on behalf of a group or individual calling themselves "Fighters of the Male State", claiming to be targeting a "feminist regime" and wanting to "make our mark on history". They threatened to "turn the skies red" with explosions.
These details were first reported by Italian media and then confirmed to the BBC by Aeroporti di Roma, which manages both of the city airports. "Fighters of the Male State" likely refers to the Russian group "Muzhskoi Legion" ( "Male Legion") - an ultra-right group with such extreme views it was banned by a Moscow court in 2021. Yet it retained tens of thousands of online followers as it cheered on the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in the following year.
But that email, even if genuine, is unlikely to provide the leads that police and airport authorities need to pin down who is generating these hoaxes and why. UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander described Thursday's incidents as "malicious hoax threats." She said the government was taking "these threats seriously", stressing that there were "established processes for dealing with hoax and malicious threats". A UK government spokesperson later said the threats reported "in the early hours" of the day had been "resolved", without giving any further details.
Heathrow later said in a statement it had received a threat earlier in the day which was "deemed not credible", adding there was "no risk to passengers, colleagues or the aircraft". "There are robust UK aviation security standards in place to assess and safely manage these types of situations," the statement said. Meanwhile, a Birmingham Airport spokesperson told the BBC it had received a threat, after which "processes were immediately initiated in conjunction with emergency services and partners".
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