Irish Newsrooms Evacuated and Flights Diverted as Dublin Calls the Bomb Threats a Coordinated Campaign

Newsrooms across Ireland were evacuated and multiple European flights were disrupted on 6 November in the third wave of hoax bomb threats in a week, prompting the Irish government to say the campaign appeared coordinated and the EU to activate an aviation security information-sharing mechanism.

What happened

Emails warning of devices were sent to Irish media organisations through the day. Several newsrooms were cleared. At least 22 flights across Europe were affected over the course of the week, with diversions and emergency landings in France, Italy, Czechia and Bulgaria among others.

The most dramatic single incident came a day earlier, when an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome was escorted to the Evreux-Fauville air base in France by fighter jets after a threat was received. Passengers disembarked on a military apron.

The email that accompanied Friday's wave warned that "this is only the beginning", according to the Financial Times.

Dublin's assessment

The Irish government said on 6 November that the bomb claims sent to Irish media outlets, arriving alongside the spate of threats against flights across Europe, appeared to form a coordinated campaign. Officials did not attribute it publicly.

The claims themselves are contradictory in ways that suggest deliberate noise. The 279 fake threat emails sent to Italian schools this week, forcing mass evacuations, were signed in the name of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a claim not being treated as credible. The threat against the Aer Lingus flight was sent in the name of "Male State", a Russian misogynistic group founded in 2016 by a fitness blogger, designated extremist by Moscow after a harassment campaign against women, gay people and organisations it deemed to promote diversity, which after the 2022 invasion refocused on glorifying the war and shifted toward supporting the Russian state.

Why attribution is the hard part

Current technology makes it particularly difficult to trace the origin of an email threat or identify those behind it, a fact that is itself a design feature of this kind of operation. The cost of sending the mail is close to zero. The cost of responding is a full security protocol per flight, per building, per city.

Italy's 279 school evacuations in a single week illustrate the asymmetry. Police and bomb disposal units respond to each one. Nothing needs to be true for the response to be expensive.

The European response

The EU activated an aviation security information-sharing mechanism following the threats, and Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said it was too early to establish links between the incidents. The wording was careful: the mechanism exists precisely because the incidents are numerous enough to need correlation.

Similar campaigns offer a template. Montenegro recorded mass false bomb threats in 2022. Moldova logged roughly 400 fake threats in less than a year in 2023, straining police capacity to the point where response itself became the vulnerability.

The pattern it belongs to

For many security analysts the week falls into a broader pattern of suspected hybrid activity by Russia spanning sabotage, hacking, provocative pranks and exploding parcels, aimed at destabilising countries supporting Ukraine. The sequence matters: this campaign arrived after hacks on blood banks and supermarket fridges in Ireland and France that forced the mass discarding of fresh food, and after a foiled parcel bomb plot across European logistics networks.

Each incident is deniable, each is cheap, and none needs to succeed as an attack to work as a disruption. The target is not the aircraft. It is the assumption that the systems around ordinary life can be trusted to function, and the willingness of governments to keep absorbing the cost of proving they can.