This morning, Thursday, November 5th, was chaotic in European skies due to several bomb scares. To be precise, 18 flights were affected by the threats, six of which involved Italy: two bound for Rome, two bound for Malpensa, and two departing from Malpensa.

Rome

The Dublin-Rome flight , operated by Aer Lingus, was diverted to France and forced to make an emergency landing at Evreux-Faville, Normandy . The plane, scheduled to arrive in the capital at 10:30 a.m., turned back south of Paris and, after several circles north, turned south again for the emergency landing, escorted by a French Air Force fighter jet. The 151 passengers and six crew members were evacuated, and bomb squads were deployed.

Instead, the Finnair flight from Helsinki landed regularly in Rome, escorted by Air Force jets . Here too, a bomb scare later proved unfounded, with bomb disposal experts boarding the aircraft to conduct clearance operations.

"I can confirm that today, November 5, flights AY1761 from Helsinki to Rome, carrying 144 passengers and seven crew members, and AY1471 from Helsinki to Vienna, carrying 177 passengers and six crew members, received a bomb threat report, which later proved to be unfounded," Stiina Tuunanen, Finnair's communications manager, told Finnish broadcaster Yle. The airline explained that "both flights landed safely at their destinations, and the passengers disembarked."

The threat

The bomb threat on the two flights was triggered by an email signed by "fighters of the male state." The message, written in Italian, had the subject line "threat report." The text read: "You are all complicit in a criminal conspiracy. We want to destroy you for this. For this very reason, at this precise moment, explosive devices have been placed on the following flights: AY1761, Helsinki - Italy; EL402, Dublin - Italy. They are headed to your airport. We, fighters of the male state, will leave a mark on history with our actions today. Your feminist regime will remember this forever . The explosion will occur in 60 minutes. Today your sky will be red."

A similar email arrived at Malpensa Airport. And the signature of the "fighters of the male state" refers to the Russian ultranationalist and misogynist movement 'Muzhskoye Gosudarstvo', already known to international authorities, founded by Vladislav Pozdnyakov and banned in Russia. This group was founded in 2016 by Vladislav Pozdnyakov, a Russian far-right, misogynist, and ultranationalist blogger and activist.

Milan

Other alarms concerned flights departing or landing at Malpensa. These included the Malpensa-Warsaw flight departing at 7:00 a.m. and operated by Wizz Air, the Malpensa-Bucharest flight operated by the same airline, the Aegean Airlines flight departing from Thessaloniki and bound for Milan, and the Ryanair flight departing from Porto bound for Malpensa . Aside from the flight to Warsaw, which was forced to make an emergency landing in Vienna, all other planes landed safely at their destinations. Bomb disposal operations were then carried out.

"Wizz Air," a statement from the company reads, "confirms that today's Milan Malpensa-Warsaw flight (W4 6387) was diverted to Vienna following a bomb threat received during the flight. The diversion was carried out in accordance with established security protocols and procedures, with the safety of passengers and crew as the primary priority."

The other alarms

Additional alerts were issued for four flights to Prague, three to Bulgaria (including takeoff and escort by Bulgarian Air Force jets), and one from Warsaw to Brussels. Four more flights hit Madrid airport, Spanish authorities announced, adding that security forces ruled out any risk. The Guardia Civil's TEDAX bomb squad inspected the planes and baggage and ruled out the presence of explosives.

Growing threat

The responsibility for the threats remains to be determined; it's not certain, but a connection between the numerous incidents is certainly conceivable. This wave of warnings comes amid growing concern about hybrid attacks that can cause disruption and destabilization, from those that targeted supermarket refrigeration systems to the hacker attack on blood reserves in France. Furthermore, on Tuesday, there were also bomb threats on a dozen flights in Europe, all of which later proved unfounded. Experts believe this is a coordinated attack by a group.

Coordination at the European level is suspected. For this reason, international cooperation channels have been activated to identify the servers through which the emails announcing the bombs aboard airliners transited, as well as the IP addresses to identify those responsible. From what has been reconstructed so far, the emails apparently came from compromised addresses or from email addresses that offer anonymizing services such as Proton Mail.

(Unioneonline)

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