Public safety incident

A CHURCH was evacuated in Cordoba after a suspicious backpack sparked the latest in a wave of bomb scares sweeping across Spain this week.Police cordoned off the Nuestra Señora de la Consolacion parish in the Andalucian city after receiving a call about a suspicious bag inside the building on Thursday evening.Specialists from the Policia Nacional’s anti-bomb squad, Tedax, rushed in to examine the backpack before eventually declaring it safe when they found no explosives inside.The scare came just two days after a bomb exploded in Oviedo, northern Spain, killing a Policia Nacional officer and seriously injuring another.Officers were searching a residential building for a petty criminal known locally as ‘the Russian,’ who had been accused of shooting a 17-year-old girl during a row between neighbours.They spotted a half-open backpack on top of a row of mailboxes as soon as they entered, and called in Tedax specialists and sniffer dogs to deal with the threat.But the bag exploded as officers carried it outside.The blast killed a Policia Nacional dog handler and his animal, while a Tedax specialist who had been examining the backpack was seriously injured.Since the Oviedo incident, police have scrambled to investigate suspicious bags and abandoned suitcases across the country, triggering evacuations, road closures and controlled explosions.No explosives have been found in any of the suspicious items outside the deadly Oviedo blast, and investigators have not linked the incidents to a coordinated campaign.In Madrid, bomb squads carried out controlled explosions on suspicious luggage in Plaza de España and Guadarrama, while police investigated abandoned bags in Arganda del Rey and nearby Galapagar.Similar scares unfolded in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where several abandoned bags prompted a controlled explosion, and Sevilla, where suspicious suitcases led to evacuations in the city centre and near the headquarters of left-wing party Podemos.In Marbella, the San Pedro Alcantara health centre was evacuated after a suitcase was found nearby. It was later found to contain only papers.A separate backpack scare at Zaragoza-Delicias railway station in northern Spain also proved to be a false alarm.The heightened alert in Spain comes amid a wider wave of disruption caused by bomb hoaxes targeting flights and schools across Europe.
At least 34 flights across Europe were hit by hoax bomb threats between November 2 and 6, with some forced to divert or make emergency landings as fears grew over an apparently coordinated campaign to disrupt air travel.At least 25 threats were reported last Thursday alone, affecting flights in Italy, Ireland, the UK, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, France, Greece, Serbia and Czechia.The school threats then followed on November 11, when around 6,300 Italian schools, 470 in Scotland and more than 300 in Northern Ireland received emails threatening bomb attacks.Hundreds of Italian schools were evacuated, while police in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland dismissed similar messages as hoaxes.