Birmingham parcel fire was ‘rehearsal’ for Russian attacks on US flights

A string of parcel fires in Birmingham, Warsaw and Germany are believed to have been trial runs for a Russian attack on flights to the US say Polish prosecutors.

Four people have been arrested by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office, related to parcels “which spontaneously ignited or detonated during land and air transport”.

Polish Prosecutor Katarzyna Calow-Jaszewska said the goal of the group was “to test the transfer channel for such parcels, which were ultimately to be sent to the United States of America and Canada”.

In July, a suspicious fire took hold at a DHL warehouse in Minworth, Birmingham, thought to have been caused by an incendiary device hidden inside a package.

Similar fires broke out at a transport company near Warsaw and at a warehouse in Leipzig, all in the space of three days.

Last month Ken McCallum, head of the UK’s domestic intelligence agency MI5, said that Russian secret agents had carried out “arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness” after the UK aided Ukraine in Russia’s war.

A Kremlin spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal the claims were “traditional unsubstantiated insinuations from the media”.