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A series of accidents on DHL planes and warehouses are increasingly being called coordinated sabotage

A DHL Boeing cargo plane crashed near Vilnius airport. This happened against the backdrop of other incidents with parcels from this logistics company, in which European intelligence began to suspect foreign intelligence services were involved.

Madrid-born Javier Bustillo has worked for Swiftair for almost 18 years, 13 of which as the company's commercial manager. For the past four and a half years, Bustillo has been a Boeing 737 captain in charge of charter operations. Colleagues described him as a cheerful professional, passionate about his work, a wonderful husband and father of two children, whom he called his treasures.

A Boeing B-737-400 SF from the Spanish company Swiftair, leased by DHL, crashed on the morning of November 25 in the vicinity of Vilnius airport when it was performing a maneuver on the way from Leipzig. As a result of the fall, the pilot was killed and three other crew members were injured. The plane crashed into a two-story residential building in which 12 people lived, none of whom were miraculously injured.

In addition to the possible human factor or technical failure, the Lithuanian authorities do not exclude the possibility of a terrorist attack or an act of sabotage.

The plane that crashed was put into service in 1993 by Qantas. In 2014, it was acquired by Swiftair from the Cambodian airline Wat Phnom Airlines, it was converted into a cargo ship in 2015, and in 2016 it was transferred to European Air Transport under a wet lease agreement, writes Puente de Mando.

Spanish intelligence services are already conducting their investigation into the plane crash, and El Mundo journalists immediately recalled the mysterious incident that occurred in Spain last spring.

On March 30, 2023, an industrial plant caught fire in the Spanish city of Fuenlabrada. It was a logistics warehouse for the Ukrainian courier company Meest. At first, no one suspected that it could be a deliberate arson. Until the British newspaper The Guardian published a report that another similar building of the same company was burned down in Leyton, north London. On July 22, a DHL warehouse was destroyed in a similar fire in Birmingham.

"Risk of plane crashes over the ocean"

On November 4, The Wall Street Journal published an article in which it was claimed that, according to Western intelligence services, military intelligence of one of the countries was allegedly behind an attempt to organize fires on cargo planes en route to the United States and Canada. The algorithm of planned sabotage was similar to those that occurred in the summer.

In July of this year, fires at the warehouses of the transport company DHL in Birmingham, England and Leipzig, Germany occurred due to parcel fires. In both cases, electric massagers with a flammable mixture based on magnesium were used, sources told the publication. Both incidents were part of a covert operation aimed at causing fires on cargo or passenger planes flying to North America, Western intelligence sources said at the time.

According to sources, the incendiary devices ignited shortly before the planned loading onto the planes. Earlier it was reported that one of the parcels caught fire at a DHL warehouse in Leipzig because the flight was delayed. WSJ interlocutors familiar with the investigation reported that German police tested mock-ups of incendiary devices. It turned out that fire extinguishing systems on board aircraft could not cope with a magnesium fire, which would require an emergency landing by the pilots. Sources also note that there was a risk of plane crashes over the ocean.

According to representatives of the intelligence services, the massagers sent from Lithuania to the UK could have been used to test the possibility of transporting such devices on flights to the USA or Canada.

Lithuanian police have detained a suspect who sent four incendiary devices, two of which were sent through the DHL office in Vilnius, a European law enforcement official said. According to his statement, the detainee allegedly identified himself as Igor Prudnikov, but his real name, according to the police, is Alexander Suranovas.

Among other things, the Polish prosecutor's office announced the detention of four people in connection with the fires and brought charges of participation in sabotage or terrorist operations, allegedly organized on behalf of foreign intelligence. According to investigators, the group intended to test the delivery channel for packages that were planned to be sent to the United States or Canada. The Polish authorities did not disclose the identity and citizenship of the detainees. At the same time, they are cooperating with other countries to search for at least two other suspects.

DHL uses both cargo and passenger aircraft to transport parcels. A company spokeswoman told WSJ that the incendiary devices that caught fire in July were shipped on cargo planes.

Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov then said in a comment to The Wall Street Journal that the Kremlin "never heard any official accusations" of Russia's involvement in these incidents. “These are traditional unsubstantiated media insinuations.”

"The result of sabotage"

After the Boeing DHL crash, a number of world politicians made statements that did not blame anyone, but indirectly hinted that it was not just an accident.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Bärbock told reporters at the G7 summit:

“We, together with our Lithuanian and Spanish partners, must now seriously ask ourselves whether this was an accident or another incident of hybrid warfare.”

It was followed by statements from German Chancellor Scholz. When asked whether the accident was the result of a hybrid war, the chancellor replied :

“We are looking at this closely, we cannot say at the moment, but it may be so - there are many, many bad forms of hybrid warfare that we see in Germany,” he said in comments to Germany's ZDF. “We won’t press charges until we can prove it.”

At the same time, Lithuanian authorities report that at the moment no evidence indicating sabotage has been found. The head of Lithuanian counterintelligence, Darius Jauniskis, told reporters at a press conference:

“We cannot deny the possibility of terrorism... But at the moment we cannot make any statements, since we do not have reliable information.”

“Our initial findings do not indicate that we need to investigate more serious actions,” prosecutor Arturas Urbelis said in a Nov. 26 statement. “We may find signs of other types of activity as we continue our investigation,” he added.

On November 27, Germany again expressed its suspicions. The DHL plane crash in Lithuania could be a “test” to “identify weak points,” Bundeswehr Inspector General Carsten Breuer said on ARD, as quoted by the newspaper Die Welt. “We already encountered a similar situation this summer, and now there is an incident that fits into this pattern.”