After Friday’s arson at drone manufacturer LPP’s Pardubice production hall, Prime Minister Babiš told Czech defense companies to secure their own premises better. LPP, he said, hadn’t done enough.
LPP’s own account complicates the blame. The hall was fully electronically secured, spokeswoman Martina Tauberová told HN, and all recordings were handed to investigators. It was also empty — taken offline for a planned renovation. If a fully instrumented, unoccupied building can be professionally torched by what police and intelligence services are treating as an international organised group, it’s worth asking what level of private security would actually have made the difference.
The group claiming responsibility, Earthquake Faction, registered its domain the day before the attack and posted video to a brand-new Telegram channel. Security experts aren’t buying the cover story: the operation was too clean for typical pro-Palestinian activism and fits a false-flag pattern — attributed to one actor, run by another. A Russian trace and a competitor sabotage angle are both on the table, the latter given LPP’s advanced drone AI and the co-located Ukrainian firm Archer.
Other companies in the same Pardubice zone — ERA (Omnipol) and Eldis (CSG), both passive radar manufacturers — tightened site security over the weekend. Off the record, defense industry sources told HN what they actually need is better state cooperation on threat intelligence. That’s a harder ask when the state is pointing the finger back at them.
Babiš cancelled a trip to Budapest’s nationalist summit to deal with the fallout. It’s a convenient line for a government simultaneously cutting budgets for the intelligence services whose job is to prevent exactly this. Might it also be a signal that he wasn’t exactly keen to hang out with far right nationalists? It’s not like the man is ideological…
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