Drone activity near four airports in Denmark overnight was the “work of a professional actor”, Denmark’s defence minister has warned just two days after the country’s main hub was shut down in response to sightings that rattled European aviation.
Aalborg airport, in north Denmark, was forced to shut down after the drone sightings, while three smaller airports in the region– Esbjerg, Sonderborg and Skrydstrup – remained open despite similar incidents.
It is unclear how many drones were seen in the incident, which also affected the country’s armed forces due to the military base stationed at Aalborg airport.
“There can be no doubt that everything points to this being the work of a professional actor,” defence minister Troels Lund Poulsen said. “ It certainly does not look like a coincidence. It looks systematic. This is what I would define as a hybrid attack.”
National police said the incident had followed a similar pattern to the one that halted flights at Copenhagen airport for four hours on Monday, with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen refusing to rule out Russian involvement.
Denmark is now considering whether to invoke Nato Article 4, which would formally request talks over the incident, a move taken by Poland and Estonia following repeated Russian incursions into their airspace in recent weeks.
Four flights were affected on Wednesday night’s incident, the police spokesperson said, including two SAS planes, one Norwegian and one KLM flight.
Eurocontrol, which oversees European air traffic control, said arrivals and departures at Aalborg airport would be at a “zero rate” until 4am GMT on Thursday due to drone activity in the vicinity.
Danish authorities said the incident that halted flights at Copenhagen airport on Monday was the most serious attack yet on the country’s critical infrastructure.
Speaking in New York during the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said she “could not rule out” Russian involvement in the shutdown of Copenhagen airport.
“We have seen drones over Poland that should not have been there. We have seen activity in Romania. We have seen violations of Estonian airspace,” Ms Frederiksen told reporters. “This is a serious attack on critical Danish infrastructure.”
Authorities in Norway also shut the airspace at Oslo airport for three hours on Monday evening after a drone was seen.
Norwegian and Danish authorities are in close contact over the Copenhagen and Oslo incidents, but they have not yet been linked, Norway’s foreign minister said on Wednesday. Authorities in Oslo announced later that two foreign nationals had been arrested for flying drones within the prohibited zone close to the airport.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky then appeared to blame Russia for the incident in a post on social media, though that claim was quickly taken down.
It comes after hundreds of flights at Heathrow airport in the UK were delayed or cancelled over the weekend following a cyber attack.
