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Russia planned to conduct “acts of terrorism in the air”, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said on Wednesday, by plotting a wave of fire bomb attacks that could have brought down planes mid-flight around the world.
Warsaw had been involved in countering “acts of sabotage” conducted by Russia, Tusk added, before he referred to incendiary parcel attacks that took place in the UK, Germany and Poland during the summer.
“The latest information can confirm the validity of fears that Russia was planning acts of terrorism in the air not only against Poland,” Tusk told a news conference in Warsaw, though he did not offer more detail or explanation.
DHL parcels caught light at a warehouse in Birmingham and on the tarmac at Leipzig airport in July. Media reports said that the Lepizig parcel was about to be loaded onto a plane, while the Birmingham device travelled on a flight before causing a fire.
Two other incendiary devices were found in Poland and western leaders and intelligence officials believe the crude plot to post fire bombs by parcel was orchestrated by Russia, as a dry run for further attacks in the US.
A report in the New York Times earlier this week said that senior White House officials reviewed presumably eavesdropped details of conversations amongst senior officials in Russia’s GRU military intelligence. The Russians, the paper reported, had described the incendiary devices as a test run for an attack on the US.
Senior officials were dispatched by US president Joe Biden to warn Russian leader Vladimir Putin, via their counterparts, that Washington would hold Moscow responsible for “enabling terrorism” if the plot developed further.
The devices that caught light in Birmingham and Leipzig were originally posted from Lithuania, with at least one hidden in a massager. The simple method appeared to have exposed a weakness in security scanning for parcel services.
Safety procedures are said to have been quietly tightened up, though very few statements have been made to reassure the general public.
In September, the then-head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Thomas Haldenwang, told the Bundestag that, had the Leipzig package started burning during a flight, “it would have resulted in a crash”.
Photographs of the fire in Birmingham, published the Guardian in December, show a crate of parcels being carried by an electric vehicle bursting into a bright flame, suggesting that it could have created havoc had the parcel caught light mid air.
The light is consistent with a magnesium-based incendiary device. Magnesium fires are difficult to put out and are worsened if water is applied, knowledge that may not have been readily available to an under-pressure air crew. Special dry powder extinguishers are used instead.
Russia’s foreign ministry did not reply to requests for comment. Moscow has regularly denied any involvement in the courier depot explosions, as well as break-ins, arson and attacks on individuals that Western officials say were carried out by operatives paid by Russia.
