European flights and airports faced disruption and extra security checks on Friday as the authorities in Rome, Sofia and Copenhagen reported threats.
Two civilian aircraft — WizzAir flight W64328 from Brussels and Ryanair flight FR1730 from London Stansted — were the subjects of emailed bomb threats while flying to Bulgaria. Both planes landed safely.
Hungary ordered fighter jets to escort the Brussels to Sofia flight through its airspace. Hungarian fighter jets also escorted civilian flights from Prague to Cyprus and Romania.
A WizzAir flight from Prague to Rome was diverted to Venice and landed there on Friday due to a bomb scare. Italy's Ansa news agency reported that the bomb alert message came from a phone call to Rome Fiumicino Airport's control tower.
A statement from Danish police said specialist teams were at Copenhagen Airport after hostile intelligence was received about air traffic.
The authorities said there was no immediate assessment that passengers were in danger. Airport operations were altered to include baggage re-screening, and a special security perimeter was established.
Czech police officially cleared four aircraft that had landed at Vaclav Havel Airport on Thursday and were the subject of bomb threats. The security inspections concluded with no explosives or dangerous items found on board any of the planes, a spokeswoman said.
Airlines were the target of at least 25 hoax alerts across Europe on Friday. Police in France said an investigation had been opened against an Aer Lingus plane after the pilot resisted calls to divert.
An Airbus A320 flying from Dublin to Rome was diverted to the Evreux airbase in northern France on November 5 following a bomb alert, the French Prime Minister's office said.
Media groups
Irish media groups, including the national broadcaster RTE, were evacuated following bomb threats on Friday.
A presenter on one of the affected radio stations, Newstalk, said the calls had been deemed a hoax and that staff had been told they could return to the building in central Dublin.
The Irish Independent newspaper group reported that its offices in the capital had also been evacuated. A reporter for RTE radio said a threat was sent to the broadcaster by email shortly before 9am local time that a bomb was going to go off within 45 minutes.
The presenter of RTE Radio One's mid-morning news show said he understood that the email was purported to be from the same people behind hoax bomb threats that disrupted dozens of passenger flights across Europe this week.
“It is worrying, and we take the threat seriously,” the Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said in a telephone interview with RTE shortly after the more than hour-long interruption to its programming ended.
Across Europe, the tally in the spate of bomb threats reached nearly 30 flights by the end of Thursday, after at least seven flights and a cruise ship also received hoax threats on Tuesday.
