Passenger jet bomb risk chaos spreads throughout Europe as a number of flights together with three from UK pressured to make emergency landings
Terror gripped the skies above Europe after a series of bomb threats forced at least eight passenger jets to make emergency landings in 24 hours.
A flurry of hoax calls on Tuesday morning sparked flight chaos across the continent, with planes grounded in Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Poland.
Two jets from the UK, flying out of London Heathrow and Manchester, were among those caught up in the mayhem. A third was disrupted a day earlier by a similar threat.
One of the planes hit on Tuesday, a LOT Polish Airlines flight from Heathrow to Warsaw Chopin Airport, was packed with Jewish schoolchildren from London on a Holocaust education trip.
The teens, aged 16 and 17, were amongst 181 people who were left stranded after a bomb scare diverted their jet to Warsaw-Modlin airport.
They had been on a school trip to the former concentration camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek, where millions of Jewish people were slaughtered by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
One mother, whose 16-year-old son had been on the plane, said she received a text from her boy saying his flight had been diverted.
‘In that moment I felt absolute panic and ran away from my desk to try to get hold of him,’ she told The Telegraph.
A flight from Heathrow to Warsaw received bomb threats this morning
Passengers were evacuated from the LOT Polish Airlines jet at Warsaw Modlin airport following its emergency landing
The Boeing 737 MAX 8 landed safely at 10.01am and security forces are verifying the reported threat, a spokesman for Warsaw-Modlin Airport said
Airport officials at Modlin claimed the jet had been redirected shortly after 9.45am ‘due to information on an explosive device on board’.
Passengers were evacuated and nobody was injured. Security teams later swept the airliner but did not identify any explosive device.
An hour later, a Ryanair flight from Manchester was met by police and bomb disposal teams after landing at Murcia Airport in southern Spain.
The jet, carrying 114 holidaymakers, landed at 10.50am. One passenger said travellers had been kept in the dark about the suspected bomb threat until after it touched down.
‘We weren’t told anything during the flight,’ the woman, called 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 turned up, the bomb squad turned up and we were asked to evacuate… We were only later told that it was an actual threat, a bomb threat to the plane itself,’ she added.
A third plane, flying from Copenhagen to Poland, landed at Poland’s Chopin Airport in Warsaw after another bomb alert at around the same time.
A video grab of Warsaw Chopin airport following a bomb threat on board an SAS flight
Spanish officials confirmed a Ryanair plane from Manchester to Murcia airport in southern Spain came under threat
Passengers in Murcia airport following the bomb alert
The passengers were not told about the threat during their flight and only realised something was wrong when they landed and a bomb squad arrived
At Rome’s Fiumicino airport, bomb disposal experts searched two Ryanair flights – one from Lisbon and the other from Dublin – following two anonymous bomb scares. The planes were escorted by Italian fighter jets until they landed. No explosives were found.
Further threats were made to two other passenger jets travelling to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, the country’s transport ministry claimed.
A Wizz Air jet carrying 176 passengers from Bergamo, Italy, landed safely at Sofia airport. The second was a Ryanair plane from Dublin, carrying 185 passengers. Again, counter-terrorism police did not locate any explosives, Bulgarian officials said.
It is not yet clear who is responsible for the wave of bomb scares or whether they are connected.
However, British officials called them a ‘malicious hoax’. ‘The UK has one of the most robust aviation security systems in the world, with well-tested processes for dealing with any potential threats, as well as malicious hoax threats, like those we’ve seen today,’ a Government spokesman said on Tuesday.
‘Our world-leading police and intelligence agencies work closely every day to keep us safe, using the tools they have to assess and respond to potential threats.’
The incidents came a day after a Wizz Air flight from London Luton to Bulgaria was threatened and had to be escorted by a Hungarian fighter jet on Monday.
The flurry of bomb scares come as tensions between Europe and Russia continue to boil over.
A police officer and a sniffer dog inspecting a Ryanair airplane and its baggage in Murcia, Spain
The Ryanair flight had 121 people on board, including crew, according to Francisco Lucas, the Spanish government’s delegate in the Murcia region of Spain
One flight, which was meant to land at Warsaw Chopin Airport, was diverted to Warsaw Modlin
Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, claimed on Tuesday his security forces had stopped an attempted overnight provocation on its border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
He gave few details but claimed ‘individuals with flashlights’ had been observed making ‘disturbing movements’ in the border area before being stopped by Polish guards.
Mr Tusk warned Russia is looking to intensify its hybrid war with the West and claimed he had received intelligence the Kremlin was planning ‘more serious provocations on the border with Russia or even sabotage acts orchestrated by hostile services’.
The Kremlin has denied carrying out sabotage attacks against Europe.
