European airports experienced widespread disruption on Thursday, after at least 25 flights were diverted or forced to make emergency landings due to bomb threats, with eight cases linked to Italy.
On Thursday morning, airports across Europe were placed on high alert following a new wave of bomb threats directed at various airport operators.
At least 25 flights were affected, seven of which were either arriving in or departing from Italy. This latest series of threats comes just two days after a similar wave involving at least seven false alarms on November 3, all of which later proved to be unfounded.
According to information obtained by the Italian news agency Adnkronos, an email sent to Terminal 3 at Fiumicino Airport—written in Italian and titled “Threat Notification”—was signed by a group calling itself “Male State Fighters”. Sofia Airport administration in Bulgaria received a similar message bearing the exact same signature.
The threat email read: “We, the fighters of the ‘Male State’, will enter history with our actions today. Your feminist system will remember this forever. The explosion will occur in 60 minutes. Today, your skies will turn red.”
According to Euronews, the signatures point to the Russian movement “Male State” (Muzhskoye Gosudarstvo), an ultranationalist and misogynistic movement founded by Vladislav Pozdnyakov (a Russian blogger and radical nationalist activist) that has been banned in Russia.
Investigators suspect that this wave of hoax bomb threats may have been coordinated on a European level. Consequently, international cooperation channels have been activated to trace the servers and IP addresses used to send the bomb threat emails.
Meanwhile, the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Busto Arsizio has opened a case against unknown perpetrators on charges of “raising a false alarm”.
