By Gianluca Lo Nostro and Yamini Kalia
Nov 12 (Reuters) – Europe needs a more harmonised approach to security and a body to lead it against “hybrid warfare” following a recent series of bomb threats, the CEO of Hungarian budget airline Wizz Air said on Thursday.
Bomb threats have disrupted travel, newsrooms and schools across Europe in November, with the latest alert temporarily disrupting train services in northern France on Thursday morning.
“I personally had a meeting with the European Commission very recently, trying to address this issue and urging these people to act together and find ways of getting coordinated,” Jozsef Varadi said in a post-earnings call.
“But this is a very hot potato because of the sovereign nation state concept, and no country wants to concede on this matter,” Varadi added. He did not say if other airline executives had also met with EU officials.
Wizz Air received hoax bomb alerts for 14 flights operated across Europe last week and had to divert two aircraft as a result of the threats sent via email to airports and airlines.
In a separate interview with Reuters, Varadi linked these threats to what he called hybrid warfare affecting the whole of Europe.
Reuters was not able to establish the identity of the sender, the origin of the emails, or whether they all had come from the same source as the threats to any or all of the dozens of flights affected this month.
The emailed threats add to concerns among European officials that the hoaxes are part of a campaign of “hybrid” disruptions, which many have blamed on Russia, aimed at countries that have helped Ukraine. Moscow has denied involvement.
“I think Europe needs to think about this, how to level up responsibilities against a threat like this,” Varadi said.
“We are an airline originating from Central Europe, we are probably closest to any of these hybrid warfare exposures than any of the Western airlines.”
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro in Gdansk and Yamini Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)
