An SAS aircraft flying from Copenhagen to Warsaw received a bomb threat on Tuesday morning and landed as scheduled at Warsaw Chopin Airport, where masked police officers inspected the plane, according to SVT Nyheter. All passengers left the aircraft and Polish police took charge of the case, the broadcaster reported, citing SAS communications chief Alexandra Lindgren Kaukji.
A passenger on board told the Danish outlet BT during the morning that the plane was standing still on a runway at Chopin Airport while masked officers carried out checks. A spokesperson for the airport told the BBC that wider flight operations were not significantly disrupted.
Why it matters
The SAS incident was one of five bomb threats against European aircraft in barely more than a day, four of them on Tuesday alone, SVT Nyheter reported. The pattern — threats arriving in flight, forcing escorts, diversions and ground inspections — has put security procedures at several airports and airlines under scrutiny at the same time, even though no explosives have been found in the cases where searches have been completed.
A morning of alerts across Poland
The SAS flight was not the only aircraft affected in Poland on Tuesday. Shortly before 10 a.m., an alert was triggered for a plane travelling from London Heathrow to Warsaw Chopin, and a Boeing 737 MAX landed at Warsaw-Modlin Airport at 10:01, the airport said in a statement on its website. Traffic at Modlin resumed after a closure of a few hours, but the section of the airport where the London flight touched down remained shut, according to the airport.
Later, just before 1 p.m., a Ryanair plane en route from Manchester to Murcia in Spain was also hit by a bomb threat. The aircraft and its passengers landed safely, and roughly an hour later the Spanish government's regional representative, Francisco Lucas, said the plane had been examined and no explosives were found, SVT Nyheter reported. Operations at Murcia Airport returned to normal.
A fourth aircraft on Tuesday, flying from Israel to the Bulgarian capital Sofia, was also threatened and was checked by police. Bulgaria's public service broadcaster BNT News reported that the threat was one of several directed at various institutions in the country, and that the national anti-terror police were investigating.
The Monday precedent
The run of incidents began a day earlier. On Monday morning, a Wizz Air flight from London to Sofia received a bomb threat while in the air and was escorted by fighter jets to Budapest in Hungary, according to SVT Nyheter.
The source material does not identify who is believed to be behind the threats, nor does it say whether investigators have linked the individual cases. It also does not state how many passengers were on board the affected flights.
SVT Nyheter noted in its coverage that in fast-moving news situations it can be difficult to confirm every fact, and that it reports what is known and what is not.
What to watch: whether Polish and Bulgarian investigators establish a connection between the threats, and whether airlines or airports announce changes to security screening as a result.
