Fear spread across European airspace after a wave of bomb threats forced at least eight passenger aircraft to make emergency landings within 24 hours.
A series of hoax calls on Tuesday morning triggered disruption across the continent, grounding or diverting flights in Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Poland.
Two UK flights departing from London Heathrow and Manchester were caught up in the disruption. A third aircraft was affected by a similar warning the previous day.
Among Tuesday’s affected flights was a LOT Polish Airlines service from Heathrow to Warsaw Chopin Airport carrying Jewish schoolchildren from London on a Holocaust education trip.
The 16- and 17-year-old students were among 181 people left stranded after the bomb alert forced the aircraft to divert to Warsaw-Modlin Airport.
The group was travelling to the former Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek, where millions of Jewish people were murdered during the Second World War.
The mother of one 16-year-old passenger said her son texted to tell her that his flight had been diverted.
‘At that moment, I felt absolute panic and ran away from my desk to try to get hold of him,’ she told The Telegraph.
A Heathrow-to-Warsaw flight was targeted by a bomb threat on Tuesday morning
Passengers were evacuated from the LOT Polish Airlines aircraft after it made an emergency landing at Warsaw-Modlin Airport
The Boeing 737 MAX 8 landed safely at 10.01am as security teams investigated the reported threat, a Warsaw-Modlin Airport spokesman said
Officials at Modlin Airport said the aircraft had been diverted shortly after 9.45am ‘because of information about an explosive device on board’.
All passengers were evacuated, and no one was hurt. Security teams searched the aircraft but found no explosive device.
About an hour later, police and bomb disposal specialists met a Ryanair flight from Manchester after it landed at Murcia Airport in southern Spain.
The aircraft, carrying 114 holidaymakers, touched down at 10.50am. One passenger said travellers were not informed about the suspected threat until after landing.
‘We weren’t told anything during the flight,’ a passenger named Sarah told BBC 5 Live. ‘The plane stopped quite suddenly, and then we were kept on the runway for around 30 minutes.’
‘Then the fire engines arrived, the bomb squad turned up and we were asked to evacuate… It was only later that we were told there had been an actual threat—a bomb threat against the plane itself,’ she said.
Another aircraft travelling from Copenhagen to Poland landed at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport after a separate bomb warning was issued at around the same time.
Video footage showed Warsaw Chopin Airport after a bomb threat was reported on an SAS flight
Spanish officials confirmed that a Ryanair service from Manchester to Murcia was targeted by a threat
Passengers waited at Murcia Airport after the bomb alert
Passengers were not told about the threat in flight and only realised something was wrong after landing, when bomb disposal teams arrived
At Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, bomb disposal experts searched two Ryanair aircraft—one arriving from Lisbon and another from Dublin—after anonymous bomb threats were received. Italian fighter jets escorted both planes to the airport, but no explosives were found.
Two more passenger aircraft bound for the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, were also targeted, according to Bulgaria’s transport ministry.
A Wizz Air aircraft carrying 176 passengers from Bergamo, Italy, landed safely in Sofia. The second flight was a Ryanair service from Dublin with 185 passengers on board. Counter-terrorism officers found no explosives on either aircraft, Bulgarian officials said.
Authorities have not established who made the threats or whether the incidents were linked.
British officials described the warnings as a ‘malicious hoax’. ‘The UK has one of the most robust aviation security systems in the world, with well-tested processes for responding to potential threats, including malicious hoax threats such as those seen today,’ a Government spokesman said on Tuesday.
‘Our world-leading police and intelligence agencies work closely every day to keep people safe, using the tools available to assess and respond to potential threats.’
The incidents followed a separate warning on Monday involving a Wizz Air flight from London Luton to Bulgaria, which was escorted by a Hungarian fighter jet.
The spate of bomb scares comes as tensions between Europe and Russia continue to escalate.
A police officer and sniffer dog searched a Ryanair aircraft and its baggage in Murcia, Spain
The Ryanair flight carried 121 people, including crew, according to Francisco Lucas, the Spanish government’s delegate in Spain’s Murcia region
A flight scheduled to arrive at Warsaw Chopin Airport was diverted to Warsaw-Modlin
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday that security forces had thwarted an attempted overnight provocation near the country’s border with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.
He provided few details, but said Polish guards had stopped ‘individuals with flashlights’ after observing them making ‘disturbing movements’ in the border area.
Tusk warned that Russia was seeking to intensify its hybrid war against the West. He said intelligence indicated that the Kremlin could be preparing ‘more serious provocations on the border with Russia or even sabotage acts orchestrated by hostile services’.
The Kremlin has denied responsibility for sabotage attacks in Europe.
