COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The airport in Norway’s second-largest city was briefly closed Wednesday after at the very least one drone was spotted nearby by area residents, authorities said.
The primary drone sighting at Bergen Airport was reported at 4:15 a.m., police spokesman Ørjan Djuvik said, adding that the Norwegian army and state-owned airports operator Avinor were informed. Police said no suspects had been identified.
Other drone sightings were later reported.
“There will also be observations that may very well be other phenomenon, as an example weather,” Djuvik said, but adding that “we’re unsure whether it’s a number of drones, but we’re sure that there may be at the very least one.”
Bergen Airport, which has 15 gates, was shut down at around 6:30 a.m. and reopened 2½ hours later. It is the second-largest airport in Norway and serves greater than 6 million passengers a 12 months, in response to the airport’s website.
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Quite a few drone sightings have been reported near Norwegian offshore oil and gas platforms and infrastructure in recent weeks.
On Monday, Norwegian Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl asked people to pay attention to suspicious activity and said that domestic security agency PST had received numerous recent drone suggestions.
“I’d say that it will be significant that we now have vigilance in society for activity that will appear suspicious. This needs to be reported to the local police,” she said.
A minimum of six Russian residents have been detained over the past few weeks for flying drones or taking photographs of sensitive sites in Norway.
There’s heightened security around key energy, web and power infrastructure following last month’s underwater explosions that ruptured two natural gas pipelines within the Baltic Sea that were built to deliver Russian gas to Germany.
The blasts happened off each Sweden and Denmark — in international waters but inside the countries’ exclusive economic zone. The damaged Nord Stream pipelines discharged huge amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the air.
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