Texte original publié par No es época para tontos.
How many fires initially treated as ordinary accidents may actually have been covert acts of sabotage understood only months or years later?
This investigation examines how fire has become a weapon of hybrid warfare in Europe, and how the operational model has evolved from traditional intelligence operations into a decentralized system of local recruits, encrypted messaging, cryptocurrency payments and plausible deniability.
In Warsaw, prosecutors accused a Belarusian suspect of setting fire to an OBI hardware store while acting on instructions linked to Russian intelligence. In Vilnius, the IKEA arson case reached a judicial conviction: a teenager was recruited into a clandestine structure and promised €10,000 to burn commercial targets in Lithuania and Latvia.
The investigation then reconstructs the destruction of Warsaw’s Marywilska 44 shopping centre, home to around 1,400 businesses. After an extraordinary forensic investigation involving dozens of prosecutors, more than one hundred police officers and 121 days of work at the scene, Polish authorities attributed the fire to an organized structure acting under orders from Russian special services.
In London, British citizens were convicted under the UK National Security Act after an arson attack on a warehouse containing humanitarian aid and Starlink terminals destined for Ukraine. In Prague, a Colombian suspect accused of trying to burn public buses was linked by Czech authorities to an operation they said was organized and financed from Russia.
The episode explores what Czech intelligence has described as “Telegram agents”: locally recruited individuals contacted through encrypted apps, tested with minor assignments and later paid to carry out sabotage. Their nationality may have little connection to whoever ultimately ordered the operation. A Colombian, Briton, Belarusian or teenager can become the physical executor while the strategic command remains several layers away.
This is the uberization of sabotage: acts traditionally associated with trained intelligence officers transformed into micro-jobs outsourced through digital platforms.
Another escalation came through the weaponization of civilian logistics. Incendiary parcels sent through DHL and DPD networks ignited in Leipzig, Poland and Birmingham, while another device was recovered intact. One package caught fire shortly before it was due to be loaded onto an aircraft.
A particularly disturbing feature is the order given to some recruits to film the fire. The recording can serve three purposes: proof that the job was completed before payment, propaganda showing European infrastructure burning, and intelligence on emergency-response tactics.
Why use fire instead of a bomb? Because a bombing instantly triggers counterterrorism and national-security responses. A warehouse burning at three in the morning may initially look like an electrical fault or industrial accident. Fire is cheap, highly destructive and capable of destroying evidence of its own origin. Ambiguity buys time.
The programme also revisits the 2014 Vrbětice ammunition-depot explosions in the Czech Republic, later attributed by Czech authorities to operatives of GRU Unit 29155. The strategy remains similar: damage infrastructure, disrupt supply chains and create economic and psychological pressure while keeping attribution difficult enough to remain inside the grey zone between crime, sabotage and conventional warfare.
Finally, this modern forensic framework is applied to the September 2026 fire at La Querola d’Ordino in Andorra: a luxury development with around €130 million in declared investment, 51 homes marketed between roughly €2.4 million and €6.3 million, no final occupancy approval at the time of the disaster, and two previous fires reported in 2024.
The investigation is categorical on one point: there is no physical, digital or judicial evidence in the material examined linking the La Querola fire to Russian intelligence, the Russian state or sanctioned individuals. No Andorran or European authority cited in the transcript has made such an attribution.
La Querola is therefore presented as a case study in methodology, not as an accusation. Modern investigators must combine fire engineering, digital forensics, financial analysis, insurance structures, sanctions exposure, telecommunications and geopolitical context before ruling sabotage in—or out.
The central lesson is unsettling but precise: after an exceptional fire, asking only “How did it start?” may no longer be enough. Investigators may also need to ask: “Who needed it to start?”
Because the ultimate success of covert arson is not simply destroying a building. It is making the public, police and emergency services believe, for as long as possible, that they are looking at nothing more than a tragic accident.
