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Bomb threats warning "the clock is ticking" were sent to television stations across Europe on Friday, forcing evacuations and knocking programmes off the air. Irish broadcaster RTE, Britain's Sky, Bulgaria's Nova TV and other stations all received the warnings, according to Reuters — and no bombs were found at any of the sites. It is the latest wave in a week of hoax threats that has already disrupted flights from Serbia to Finland to Spain.
What the threats said
According to Reuters, the emails were titled "MESSAGE TO THE WEST" and warned: "It will detonate in 45 minutes. The clock is ticking." At RTE in Ireland, programmes were replaced by music and a pre-recorded message, some for as long as three hours, while staff evacuated the building. Sky said it had received a security threat, carried out a security assessment and reported the matter to the authorities, adding that the safety of its colleagues was its primary concern.
The emails sent to RTE and Nova TV were signed with the name Mikhail Andropov, and the author claimed to be one of the leaders of the group responsible for this week's plane hoaxes. The surname is shared with Yuri Andropov, a former general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and the email's title echoes a biography of Andropov called "New Challenge to the West". It is unclear who was actually behind Friday's hoaxes, and Reuters reports that the identity of the sender has not been established.
Part of a wider wave
The television threats follow a string of hoax bomb threats that has disrupted passenger flights across Europe in recent days, forcing diversions, emergency landings and security sweeps — though no explosives have been found so far in any of the incidents. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said European security agencies had not yet determined whether the threats to air travel and media organisations were being made by individuals or as part of a coordinated attack.
That uncertainty is the point of the exercise, if it is an exercise at all. A hoax costs the sender almost nothing and costs the target hours of disruption, police time and public anxiety — and when the same pattern hits airlines one day and broadcasters the next, the effect compounds even without a single real device. Television stations make an especially attractive target for this kind of disruption: they are live, public-facing and built around the clock, so an evacuation does not just stop work — it stops the broadcast itself, in front of an audience. European authorities are now treating the two waves as potentially connected, but as of Friday evening they had not said so publicly. Until they do, the only confirmed facts are the evacuations, the empty buildings and the clock that never ran out.