Four people arrested over incendiary devices that started fires in countries including Britain were staging dress rehearsals for a Russian plot to attack a transatlantic flight, according to Polish authorities.
Parcels “containing camouflaged explosives” sent via courier companies were designed to “spontaneously” ignite or detonate during land and air transport, it is alleged.
Prosecutor Katarzyna Calów-Jaszewska said the group’s goal was allegedly “to test the transfer channel for such parcels, which were ultimately to be sent to the United States of America and Canada”.
Disguised as electric massage machines from Lithuania, the packages allegedly contained a highly flammable “magnesium-based substance” that would have burnt fiercely enough to bring down an aeroplane.
The suspects were arrested in July.
It has been reported that counter-terrorism police are investigating whether Russian spies planted a bomb in a parcel that caught fire at a delivery warehouse after arriving on a plane to Britain.
Fire crews and staff tackled the blaze on July 22 at the DHL warehouse in Minworth, near Birmingham.
The package – said to contain an incendiary device – is believed to have arrived at the DHL warehouse by air but further details about the plane and its flight path are unknown.
The other device burnt the contents of a shipping container at another DHL facility in the German city of Leipzig.
Pawel Szota, head of Poland’s foreign intelligence agency, pointed the finger at Moscow.
He told The Wall Street Journal: “I’m not sure the political leaders of Russia are aware of the consequences if one of these packages exploded, causing a mass casualty event.”
On Monday, the UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing said the arrests reported by the Polish authorities were not carried out as part of its investigation.
Katarzyna Calów-Jaszewska, of Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office, said: “During the proceedings, four people involved in the activities of the revealed sabotage and diversion group of an international nature were detained, charges were announced, and then temporarily arrested.”
The Times reports tests by German investigators are said to have found that the magnesium fire would have been hard to put out with equipment usually available on passenger and cargo jets, meaning pilots may be obliged to make a forced landing.
Several weeks after the fires in Birmingham and Leipzig, two German security agencies circulated an advisory warning there had been several similar incidents where parcels were “posted by private individuals in Europe and caught fire on their way to recipients in several European countries”.
Europe is reportedly on edge for Moscow-sponsored acts of sabotage, often commissioned by Russian spy agencies but carried out by local single-use proxies.
