A LOT flight from London Heathrow bound for Warsaw was diverted to the Polish capital's Modlin airport on Tuesday morning after a bomb threat, according to CBC, citing the Polish press agency PAP. Modlin was shut for a time and later said there had been no genuine danger, reopening once checks were done.
On the same day, Warsaw's main Chopin airport received a warning about a possible dangerous item aboard a Scandinavian Airlines flight arriving from Copenhagen. One runway was closed while standard safety measures were applied, and the aircraft landed normally rather than making an emergency landing.
The two Polish incidents were part of a wider wave of bomb threats against passenger flights in Europe over recent days. Carriers named in the reporting include LOT, SAS, Wizz Air and Ryanair. No one was hurt, no explosives were found, and none of the planes involved on Tuesday came down in an emergency. A day earlier, one aircraft did make an emergency landing, in Hungary.
Why it matters
The disruption shows how a single emailed warning can ripple through several countries' aviation systems within hours, closing runways, scattering passengers and pulling in police and, in some cases, military aircraft. Each alert has so far ended without a device being found, but the operational cost is real: diverted flights, cordoned-off terminals and delayed travellers.
The pattern also matters because it is repeated. Threats have arrived by email, targeted flights departing from different cities, and struck both budget and flag carriers. Authorities in several countries have treated each one as credible until a search proved otherwise, which is the standard response even when the warning turns out to be false.
How the Polish alerts were handled
According to PAP's account carried by CBC, the LOT aircraft was searched after landing at Modlin and the airline said nothing was found on board. Passengers were being processed through border control and were to be taken to Chopin airport by coach once that was complete.
For the SAS flight, Piotr Rudzki, acting director of the Warsaw airport's communications office, told PAP that normal safety procedures were put in place as soon as the warning came in and that one runway was shut. An SAS spokesperson, Alexandra Lindgren Kaokju, told the agency that travellers got off the plane after it landed routinely, stressing that it was not an emergency landing. She said the airline was concentrating on looking after passengers and crew and that the matter had been passed to Polish police.
Modlin's statement gave no further detail about the nature of the threat it received.
Warnings across the continent
In Bulgaria, the transport ministry said threats were sent against two aircraft flying to Sofia on Tuesday, one from Bergamo and one from Dublin. Both landed without incident and searches found no devices. The Bergamo service was a Wizz Air flight with 176 people on board, while the Dublin flight was operated by Ryanair and carried 185 passengers.
A separate flight arriving in Sofia from Israel also landed after an emailed bomb warning. BTA, quoted by CBC, reported that counterterrorism officers were examining the aircraft, according to interior ministry secretary general Lyubomir Nikolov.
In Italy, a Ryanair flight from Lisbon touched down at Rome's Fiumicino airport on Tuesday morning after an email claimed a bomb was aboard. Bomb disposal police checked passengers, crew and luggage and found nothing. A second Ryanair flight heading to Rome from Dublin was also the subject of an emailed warning; Italy's air force escorted it to Fiumicino, where the same ground checks were carried out, again without result. A Fiumicino official gave that account on condition of anonymity, CBC reported.
In Spain, sections of Murcia airport in the southeast were sealed off on Tuesday after a warning about a Ryanair flight from Manchester. Officials described the report as a hoax, and operations went back to normal once no explosives were found.
The day before, a Wizz Air flight that had left Luton, near London, for Sofia was forced to land in Hungary after a warning arrived mid-flight. Hungary's defence minister, Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi, said in a Facebook post that a Hungarian air force Gripen fighter was sent up to intercept the plane and accompanied it to Liszt Ferenc International Airport in Budapest. Wizz Air told the state news agency MTI that an inspection of the aircraft and those on board turned up no threat.
CBC also noted an earlier case: last month, a flight from Tel Aviv to Vienna made an emergency landing in Bulgaria after a bomb warning.
Taken together, the episodes point to a campaign of threats rather than a single incident, spread across Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Hungary and involving several airlines. In every case described in the reporting, the searches ended without a device being found.
What to watch: whether the frequency of these emailed warnings continues in the coming days, and whether Polish police, who now hold the SAS case, release any findings on who sent them.
