Bomb threats cause major flight disruptions across Europe

Let's start by bringing you then the latest that we're hearing on this, what appears to be anyway, a series of different incidents of planes being diverted over European skies. A flight from Ireland to Italy was diverted to a military airbase in Western France because of a bomb threat. We know that 151 passengers and six crew are said to be safe after the plane landed. We're now hearing as well, just in the last few moments, of a Finnair plane being diverted from Helsinki to Rome and also of three other planes being forced to land. And in Bulgaria, details of those two later events, a little sketchy at the moment. But let's bring in Philip Terle, who's with me here on set. Philip, what more do we know? Right, well, this is breaking news. So we're getting information as it arrives here in the newsroom in Paris. There's a statement from the French Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, going over what has happened to this. Air Lingus flight that was on a trip from Dublin to Rome. It's a regular flight. It was about to approach Paris when all of a sudden it turned sharply off its trajectory and made several loops before arriving at Evra. That's a military base which is situated about 100 kilometres northwest of Paris. All 151 passengers and crew are reported to be safe, and military bomb defence diffusal teams are examining the plane to find out whether or not there is a bomb on board. This is about the eighth bomb warning since Monday. So there's been a whole series, one off the other, one involving a Polish airline lot, one the Scandinavian Airlines SAS, Wizz Air in the UK, and Ryanair in Ireland. As you were just saying, three aircraft have been forced to land in Bulgaria. This is just... Just breaking news coming in right now. Finnair said that a plane from Helsinki has landed in Rome. It was also suspected of having a bomb on board, threats of bomb on board. And this is something that is actually not new, but it could be explained by several things. The first one is increased geopolitical tensions right now, particularly between Russia, the European Union. And the United States and the outcome of these midterm elections. There have been attacks here in France over the past few days of refrigeration units in supermarkets. And also a recent attack just overnight came on. A place where blood supplies are kept, which are used in blood transfusions. There was no damage there because the police intervened to make sure that everything was safe. There have been drone incursions into Europe and also mysterious triggers of alerts on apps. People use on their mobile phones. So I think we're seeing a phenomenon here, but no one at the moment can quite explain where it's coming from. A little bit more detail as you were talking there, Philip, coming in on those planes that have landed in Bulgaria, where you're hearing two of them came, or one of them came from Copenhagen, one from Madrid. They've landed at Sofia. And a third one came from London. That has landed in Povdiv in Bulgaria. That's just coming in to us. Any indication at this stage who this could be behind all of this? There's no immediate evidence, this is according to investigators, of a hostile state being behind these attacks or these threats. Aviation security fears were reignited with the recent fly-Jubai incident. Remember, this is where the pilot wanted to crash the plane into Tel Aviv airport, didn't manage to do that. But Russia has been regularly accused of being behind firebomb threats targeting parcel carriers using cargo planes, particularly over the last two years. But experts say that these fake hoax are all quite regular and often the work of people who find it either amusing or they wanted to delay a plane for some reason. They say that it's. It's unlikely that if it were a terrorist organization, they would warn ahead of time there is a bomb on the plane. What terrorist organizations do is to smuggle a bomb on board and then they will claim responsibility after the bomb has gone off and the plane has been destroyed. So that is more reassuring news. But certainly over the past few days, we've seen a regular occurrence of these hoax bomb hoaxes on planes. But the good news is that all planes. And airlines abide by a regular process to assess and manage bomb threats, although virtually, they say, all of them up until now have been fake. Philip, thanks very much for joining us here on set. Of course, we'll continue to follow that story for you here on France 24.