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Hoax Bomb Threats Hit Six European Flights, Including Two From UK, as Police Hunt the Sender
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Threats against planes from Heathrow and Manchester turned out to be false, but nobody has claimed responsibility and no arrests have been made.
Six passenger flights across Europe were diverted, searched or met by security teams on Tuesday after a run of bomb threats. Two of them had taken off from British airports. No explosives were found on any of the aircraft, and by the afternoon every threat had turned out to be a hoax.
The biggest disruption was caused by LOT Polish Airlines flight LO286 from London Heathrow to Warsaw. After airport authorities flagged a “potential security threat on board”, it was diverted to Warsaw Modlin with 181 people on board. Modlin shut while the aircraft and luggage were searched and reopened around midday. LOT said nothing was found.
A Ryanair flight from Manchester to Murcia, carrying 114 passengers and seven crew, landed in Spain after receiving a threat. Francisco Lucas, the Spanish government’s delegate in the region, confirmed that the Guardia Civil had ruled out explosives. The return flight was delayed by several hours while a replacement aircraft was brought in from Alicante.
There were four other incidents. An SAS flight from Copenhagen to Warsaw landed normally after a reported threat, and the case has been handed to Polish police. In Rome, separate emails claimed there were bombs on two Ryanair flights, one from Lisbon and one from Dublin. The Italian Air Force escorted the Dublin flight to Fiumicino, and bomb disposal teams checked both aircraft and found nothing. A flight from Israel to Sofia was also reportedly targeted by email.
In Rome, separate emails claimed there were bombs on two Ryanair flights, one from Lisbon and one from Dublin.
Who sent them?
Nobody knows yet. No group has claimed responsibility, no arrests have been reported and no government has named a suspect. Where officials have said how the threats arrived, it was by email. That is cheap and anonymous, and the hardest method to trace when the sender uses foreign servers or a VPN.
What is clear is that Tuesday did not come out of nowhere. On Monday a Wizz Air flight from Luton to Sofia was escorted into Budapest by a Hungarian Gripen fighter after someone claimed there was a bomb on board. Hungarian police are investigating. On 18 October, Austrian Airlines flight OS82 from Tel Aviv to Vienna made an emergency landing in Sofia after a threat that also proved false. So far, authorities are treating each incident separately and have publicly linked none of them.
There are two familiar explanations for this kind of thing. The first is the lone hoaxer. In India in 2024, hundreds of false threats grounded flights over a few weeks. Some were traced through foreign email services, and one of the few people arrested was a 17-year-old with a fake social media account. The second is a state campaign of disruption. Earlier this year European investigators identified 22 suspects believed to be working for Russian military intelligence behind incendiary parcels sent through courier networks, including one that caught fire at a DHL depot near Birmingham.
Tuesday’s threats were concentrated on Polish airspace and Ryanair routes, so suspicion may drift towards the second explanation. No official has made that link, though, and the evidence published so far supports neither theory over the other.
