Europe Slovakia investigates attack plans against infrastructure

Slovakia is following concrete indications that an international group is planning attacks on critical infrastructure. This was announced by Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok and intelligence chief Pavol Gaspar after a meeting of the National Security Council. Two people were arrested on Tuesday in a coordinated operation by the secret service and police.

Neither the Minister of the Interior nor the head of the domestic intelligence service SIS wanted to reveal the identity of the two detainees, as other persons are still being investigated by the intelligence services of friendly countries. For the time being, he could only say that the suspected group consisted of several people and included at least one Slovakian-Hungarian dual national and one Ukrainian.

Bomb threats against schools have other perpetrators

Independently of this, other intelligence services are targeting specific suspects who have been making bomb threats against schools, courts and other public institutions for months, particularly in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, unsettling the public and necessitating repeated evacuations. Although the actual danger potential of these anonymous threats is low, the perpetrators are still being consistently pursued, said Gaspar.

In this context, he did not want to "evaluate" statements made by the Czech secret service leadership, which suspected Russian actors behind the threats. He himself rejects attributions to a "Russian" or "Ukrainian" trail because these are more politically than factually motivated, said Gaspar.

SDA