At about 9.30pm on Easter Monday, in the small Dutch town of Almere near Amsterdam, the fire brigade was called to put out a blaze at a large telecoms mast — the second fire of its kind that night in the area.
Though neither of the Almere towers were equipped with any of the latest 5G telecoms equipment — in fact one was designed only for use by the emergency services — authorities soon concluded that the fires were perpetrated by vandals acting in the name of an unusual theory: that 5G networks have contributed to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Dutch mast fires are just the latest escalation in a series of similar attacks that have swept across the UK and Europe in recent weeks. Having first gained momentum online in early January, the 5G conspiracy theory — which alleges, among other things, that Covid-19 has either been caused by the frequencies used for the new wireless technology, or that those signals impair the human immune system — has spilled rapidly into the offline world.