Second wave of bomb threats hits European flights and newsrooms

On November 6, Europe experienced a second consecutive day of hoax bomb threats, following the previous day’s incidents that had already involved at least 25 flights. According to RaiNews, in the 24 hours preceding November 6 at least 30 threats targeted as many flights in the continent’s skies, with concrete repercussions on the air network.

A Wizz Air flight departing from Prague and bound for Rome was diverted to Venice. A Ryanair aircraft that had taken off from Fiumicino landed in Lisbon after a threat. The most significant case concerns Aer Lingus flight EI402, which departed from Dublin bound for Rome: according to RTÉ, the flight was diverted to the Évreux air base in France.

At the same time, the threat shifted from the skies to newsrooms. RTÉ reports that at 8:33 on November 6 an email with the subject line “MESSAGE TO THE WEST” was sent to public addresses of several media organisations in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Within an hour, staff at some Irish newsrooms were evacuated and radio and television programming was interrupted: among the sites involved were those of the public broadcaster RTÉ and the newspaper Irish Independent in Dublin.

Irish authorities, quoted by RTÉ, admit they still do not know who is responsible for the incidents, nor whether these are isolated actions or a centralised campaign. The element common to the cases — an identical email sent simultaneously to multiple outlets in two different countries — suggests coordination, but at present there has been no claim of responsibility nor confirmed attribution.

On the institutional level, the European Commission has clarified that investigations into this type of threat do not fall within its direct competence, remaining the responsibility of individual member states. Brussels does, however, maintain an information-sharing mechanism among affected countries, useful for verifying whether the incidents are connected to one another or represent unrelated initiatives.

The phenomenon poses a problem of scale even before one of security: dozens of flights diverted or forced to land at airports other than their intended destination, together with evacuations of newsrooms in multiple countries on the same day, entail significant operational and logistical costs even when — as reported by the sources cited — checks find no actual device. The repetition of threats over two consecutive days, in the absence of an identified source, leaves it to national authorities to determine whether these are isolated disruptive episodes or part of a broader strategy against transport and information infrastructure.