A Ryanair flight from Porto to Milan was among more than 20 hit by hoax bomb threats
On Thursday 5 November an anonymous email to Milan Malpensa named flight FR8953 from Porto. It landed safely and nothing was found. Across Europe more than two dozen flights were targeted, fighter jets escorted an Aer Lingus jet to a French air base and some of the messages were signed by a Russian ultranationalist group.
For the second time this week, a plane that took off from Portugal turned up on the list in a wave of hoax bomb threats across Europe. On Thursday 5 November it was Ryanair flight FR8953, from Porto’s Francisco Sá Carneiro airport to Milan.
It landed safely at Malpensa. The aircraft was searched and nothing was found.
One email, two planes
According to Italy’s ANSA news agency, as relayed by the Portuguese press, the threat arrived as an anonymous email to Malpensa airport. It claimed there were explosives on two aircraft, the Ryanair jet from Porto and an Aegean flight from Thessaloniki, and listed flight numbers, airlines and expected arrival times.
The Porto flight was one of more than twenty targeted over the day. Tallies shifted with the hour and the outlet, from 16 in the morning to 25 or 27 by the evening, as JN reported. No search turned up any explosives.
Fighter jets and diversions
France saw the tensest moment. An Aer Lingus A320 flying Dublin to Rome was diverted to the Évreux air base in Normandy, shadowed by a Mirage 2000-5 and a Rafale. The captain initially refused to land at a military base and asked for Beauvais or Nantes instead, and French prosecutors have opened inquiries.
Elsewhere, a LOT flight from Warsaw was forced down in Brussels, a Wizz Air service from Milan to Warsaw ended up in Vienna, and four Prague-bound aircraft were checked on arrival after Czech police judged the threats low-credibility.
Who signed them
Some of the emails sent to Rome’s airport were signed in the name of Male State, a Russian ultranationalist, anti-feminist movement that Russia itself banned in 2021. No government has formally attributed the threats, and Brussels said it was too early to say whether the cases are linked.
On Tuesday it was a Ryanair flight from Lisbon to Rome. For anyone flying in the next few days the pattern holds so far: targeted planes land, get searched and carry on, a few hours late at worst.
Image: Bene Riobó / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
