Ten French airports receive bomb alerts, five evacuated

Ten French airports received new bomb alerts and five of them were evacuated yesterday, according to an airport source.

The five which were evacuated include Bordeaux, Bâle-Mulhouse, Bergerac, Tarbes and Pau. Bergerac was still evacuated at 17:00 yesterday (October 26), while the others were no longer under alert, the source said.

Other airports also had bomb alerts but were not evacuated, including Lyon Saint-Exupéry, Lyon-Bron, Marseille, Biarritz and Saint-Denis de la Réunion.

Despite the alerts, disruption to air activity was minimal according to the online dashboard of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC), which only noted average delays of 20 minutes in Marseille at the end of the afternoon.

A costly decision

The evacuation of Bordeaux-Mérignac airport on Thursday, October 26 was the sixth in eight days and according to airport management the financial losses are significant.

"We haven't finished the review yet but it costs us every time", Simon Dreschel, chairman of the board of directors of Bordeaux-Mérignac airport, told France Bleu.

At this airport in particular, bomb threats are received by email. Once the alert has been received, the decision to evacuate the airport is up to the prefect of the Gironde and "here we take threats very seriously", he said.

The evacuation protocol has been modified at Bordeaux airport with Hall A, Hall B and Terminal Billi evacuated but not the runways.

However repeated evacuations still come with a cost and cause delays.

Heightened alert

More than 70 bomb threats have been made against French airports since October 18, with Transport Minister Clément Beaune saying that the threats “almost always” come from the same email address.

As a result, the police presence at French airports has been increased by up to 40%.

France has been on the highest security alert possible since the fatal stabbing of a schoolteacher on October 13 in Arras (Pas-de-Calais) by a young person who allegedly declared allegiance to the Islamic State group.

A funeral service for Dominique Bernard, the teacher killed by a knife wound to the neck, was held in the northern town where he taught at the Gambetta-Carnot school.

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