Who Is Sending Letter Bombs, Blood, and Animal Eyes to Embassies?

I t’s almost 2 p.m. in Madrid, and traffic is backed up near the U.S. Embassy.

A police helicopter hovers motionless over the building and the police cordon off the area. The average Madrileño has minimal tolerance for traffic jams, and in the years since the scourge of ETA terrorism and then jihadist attacks, they are more concerned with being able to get from A to B than with their personal safety. Blaring out all around me, a concert of irritated horns and unaddressed insults. The atmosphere can be summed up in the amusing cry of a driver: “I don’t care if I blow up and go to hell, but for God’s sake, fix this damned traffic jam!” Whenever anti-terror protocol is activated at an embassy, it’s usually a false alarm. This time, it’s not. After a while, a small explosion can be heard.

The blast was the work of the TEDAX, the Spanish police force’s explosive-deactivation specialists, who had just detonated a suspicious letter at the American embassy, identical to one that exploded a day earlier at the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid, slightly injuring an employee. Although these letters and others had little capacity to kill anyone, they were in fact letter bombs.

The contents of the envelope stopping traffic last Thursday in Madrid were pyrotechnic material and shrapnel. In total, six such letter bombs have been discovered in Spain; envelopes also were received at Moncloa Palace, the military air base at Torrejón de Ardoz, and the Zaragoza building of an arms company that sends weapons to Ukraine.

When faced with any mysterious event, we must ask ourselves, “Cui prodest?” That puts the spotlight on Russia, or any other group that seeks the destabilization of Europe.

But details are elusive. The police soon declared that all the letters follow the same pattern, have the same handwriting, and that they came from the Spanish city of Valladolid. But almost at the same time, new suspicious packages were received again at the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid: These turned out to contain animal blood, viscera, and animal eyes. It was all so surreal that the Russian Wagner Group felt compelled to deny its involvement, claiming they would never participate in something so grotesque and, this time, sounding strangely credible.

“It started with an explosion at the embassy of Ukraine in Spain,” Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba recounted to CNN. “But what followed this explosion was more weird, and I would even say sick.” The embassies of Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, and Italy, along with several European consulates, have also received bloody shipments. As I write these lines, police report that there are more letters with animal eyes arriving at the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid, and at consulates in Barcelona and Málaga. Whoever the author is, he is certainly turning half the farm blind; the eyes belong to pigs and cows.

The hypothesis with which Spanish Intelligence is working is that it is a coordinated campaign by pro-Russian groups on Spanish soil, which would explain why Spain, a secondary actor, was its first target. The first letter was addressed to the Spanish prime minister and received in late November, but the authorities decided not to publicize it. Given the silence, it is possible that the author opted for a broader campaign seeking notoriety.

Some critical voices are being raised against the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, which hastened to reveal that the letters came from Valladolid and that only one person was involved — and, a couple of hours later, predicted that the investigation would be very complex and could take a long time to identify the perpetrator. Today they clarify that the envelopes passed through Valladolid, but they could have come from León or Galicia. It is strange. Every letter’s route is registered by the postal service. A police force with 50 years of experience in terrorism should not find something like this so complex, unless the government is not interested in revealing more data.

The contents of the envelopes are not your typical bomb, but neither is this child’s play. Police sources explain to me that there is some complexity in handling the trigger device for the explosive. Ukraine has instructed its embassies to reinforce security, and this is being done. There is a suspicion in police circles that this could be the start of terrorist activity against Ukrainian interests and their allies, a mixed mode of warfare that combines battlefield action with social pressure and a sense of constant threat far from the war’s borders.

The fact that pro-Russian groups are involved, if confirmed, would not necessarily point to an attempt by Russia’s government to take the war to the heart of NATO, because gangs do not act under any official umbrella. Another factor to be considered is the worrying existence of the Russian mafia implanted in Spain. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has drawn up a list of up to 50 people linked to Russian organized crime — some of them, according to the Spanish authorities, from Putin’s entourage — who are investing in real estate while laundering money from contract killings and beatings, smuggling, or drug trafficking. These groups are familiar with letter-bomb devices, and it goes without saying that sending animal viscera and blood has been a mafia way for centuries.

Unless a lone madman admits authorship, Europe should not treat this affair as hooliganism, because it may be the start of something bigger, a consequence of war far more difficult to manage even than inflation.