When a neck massage pillow exploded into flames inside a postal warehouse on the outskirts of Birmingham in July 2024, the firefighters arriving on the scene treated it as a routine “package fire.”
“The fire was extinguished using a hose reel,” read a brief official incident log. “There were no casualties or injuries.”
But what appeared at first to be an unremarkable incident was in fact the result of a plot hatched by Russian military intelligence to send self-igniting devices around Europe, disguised as innocuous gadgets.
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One caught fire shortly before being loaded onto a plane in Germany and another burst into flames in a lorry driving through Poland.
