Suspicious packages, including blood-soaked envelopes containing “animal eyes,” have been sent to Ukrainian embassies and consulates in several European cities, the country’s foreign ministry has said.
Kyiv’s embassies in Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, Italy, Austria, and the consulates general in Naples and Krakow, have received such packages, Oleh Nikolenko, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, said Friday on Facebook.
The packages were “soaked in a liquid of a characteristic colour and had a corresponding smell,” he said. “We are examining the meaning of this message.”
Friday’s statement came after an explosion occurred on Wednesday at Ukraine’s embassy in Madrid, injuring one Ukrainian employee who was handling a letter addressed to the country’s ambassador to Spain. Spanish officials said Thursday a letter bomb was also sent to the country’s prime minister last week and another to the US embassy.
The Ukrainian Consulate in Brno, a city in the southeast of the Czech Republic, was briefly evacuated on Friday after receiving a suspicious package containing animal tissue, Czech police added in a tweet on Friday.
Ukraine has put all of its overseas diplomatic stations under heightened security following the slew of suspicious mail.
“We have reason to believe that there is a well-planned campaign of terror and intimidation of Ukrainian embassies and consulates,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said. “Unable to stop Ukraine on the diplomatic front, they are trying to intimidate us.”
Kuleba urged foreign governments to guarantee maximum protection of Ukrainian diplomatic institutions in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
In addition to the suspicious packages, Nikolenko said the entrance to the Ambassador’s residence in the Vatican was vandalized and the Ukrainian Embassy in Kazakhstan received a report of a bomb threat, which was later not confirmed.
RELATED: Explosion at Ukraine embassy in Madrid injures one person, officials say
An explosion occurred Wednesday at Ukraine’s embassy in Madrid, injuring one Ukrainian employee who was handling a letter addressed to the country’s ambassador to Spain, officials said.
The individual was slightly injured and is being treated at hospital, while police are investigating, Spain’s foreign ministry said.
Kyiv’s ambassador to Spain, Serhil Pohoreltsev, was the intended recipient of the envelope, it added.
A separate letter bomb, which was deactivated at a weapons manufacturer in northern Spain late Wednesday, had the same return address as the one that exploded in Ukraine’s embassy in Madrid, a senior Spanish official told Spanish radio station SER.
“The return address on the envelope is an email that is the same” on both envelopes, Rosa Serrano, the top Spanish government official in the Aragon region where the second bomb arrived, told SER.
The explosive sent to the weapons maker in the city of Zaragoza, in Aragon, “apparently came from Ukraine,” Serrano said, adding that authorities suspect the one at the embassy may have come from Ukraine, too.
REFERENCE:
- https://nypost.com/2022/12/02/ukrainian-embassies-receive-bloody-packages-containing-animal-eyes-kyiv/
- https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-embassies-receive-bloody-packages-containing-animal-eyes-kyiv-2022-12-02/
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/europe/ukraine-embassies-suspicious-mail-intl/index.html
By: Miss Cherry May Timbol – Independent Reporter
