Only two days after a letter with pyrotechnic material arrived at the Ukrainian Embassy in Spain and caused minor hand injuries to one of its workers, a new postal package has triggered alarms this Friday at the diplomatic legation of the Eastern country European in Madrid.
Shortly after two in the afternoon, the National Police cordoned off the building after detecting the security of the building, among the mail, a suspicious letter that had blood stains on the envelope.
The specialists in deactivation of explosives displaced to the place have confirmed shortly after that the shipment "contained neither mechanisms nor explosive or explosive substance".
What was inside it was the crushed eye of an animal.
Specifically, that of a sheep, according to police sources.
The Police believe that both the content of the package and the fact that it had been sent by mail from outside Spain rules out that the event is related to the six envelopes with pyrotechnic material that in recent days have been received at embassies, companies and Spanish institutions, among them the Embassy of Ukraine.
The Ministry of the Interior links this shipment with other threats that have been intercepted at different Ukrainian embassies and consular offices in different European countries, where there were also bloodstains and animal eyes.
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The six envelopes with pyrotechnic devices contained small amounts of gunpowder and shrapnel.
This morning, the spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Oleg Nikolenko, had reported precisely that some of his diplomatic legations on the continent had received a total of 10 similar threatening letters from "a European country", without specifying which one.
“The packages were wet with a liquid with a characteristic odor and had a certain stench.
We are studying the meaning of these messages ”, he has detailed.
Specifically, these packages have been received at their embassies in Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, Italy, Austria, as well as the consulates in Naples (Italy), Krakow (Poland) and Brno (Czech Republic).
Nikolenko added in a Facebook message that, in addition, the residence of his country's ambassador in the Vatican had been "vandalized" with excrement, while the diplomatic representation in Kazakhstan received an unconfirmed bomb threat.
A shipment arrived at the legation in Washington with "a photocopy of a critical article on Ukraine."
The minister, Dmitro Kuleba, has ordered all embassies and consulates to increase their security systems, assuring that attempts to intimidate Ukraine "for not being able to stop it on the diplomatic front" are "useless."
The new alert in Spain comes after it became known that six envelopes with gunpowder and small pieces of shrapnel had been sent to the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, in addition to the embassies of the United States and from Ukraine in Madrid, to an arms company based in Zaragoza and to the Torrejón de Ardoz air base (Madrid).
That same day, the Interior ordered the National Police and the Civil Guard to take extreme measures to protect public buildings and, in particular, the controls on postal items.
The six events are being investigated as a crime of terrorism in a case opened at the National Court last Wednesday.
The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, in a letter sent to the other countries of the EU and the Schengen Area, points out that the sending of these letters "could be related to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia".
However, the first police reports sent to the court yesterday by the investigators do not specify any hypothesis about the perpetrator.
With information from
Mariel Delgado
and
Eliona Rakipaj.