A plane carrying 161 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing in Bulgaria this morning following a bomb scare. The airplane was conducting a charter flight between the Polish capital of Warsaw and the Egyptian city of Hurghada. The flight was forced to land in Bulgaria when one of the travellers, a man in his 60s, announced that there were explosives on board. In a statement the Bulgaria interior ministry claimed a 67-year-old Polish man was questioned. The passengers were evacuated from the aircraft and Bulgarian security forces conducted an extensive search of the plane. It is believed that the man in question had consumed alcohol.
“The plane made an emergency landing at Burgas airport at 5.45am [3.45am Irish time] after a passenger said there was a bomb on board,” airport spokeswoman Kristina Neykova said. “Already in the airport, the man joked what would be done to him if he had a bomb. We were locked on the plane for an hour, and at a certain moment the doors opened and anti-terrorist forces rushed onto the plane and started shouting in English: ‘Where is the bomb, where is the bomb?’ “They asked us to raise our hands above our heads, then they grabbed the man. They ordered us out of the plane with our hands up, one by one, and to leave our belongings. Buses carried the plane’s passengers to the airport,” one passenger said. The threat was described as a “joke” by the man in question, who was taken into custody and questioned. The airport in Burgas was the site of a terrorist attack in July 2012 when a suicide bomber blew himself up on a passenger bus transporting Israeli tourists.