Italy, United Kingdom and Ireland: Bomb threats in thousands of schools

AND-mails with bomb threats were sent to thousands of schools in Italy, the UK and Ireland and not only this Wednesday. They are being treated as false, but in Italy alone some 6,000 educational establishments have been evacuated.

Similar threats, with the same modus operandi, were received by 470 schools in Scotland and Northern Ireland reported receiving the same message.

The Northern Ireland Police Service (PSNI) also explained that it was treating the e-mail, which had foreign origin, as a farce.

Also the police of the Republic of Ireland said they were aware that a “general communication” had been sent to several “educational institutions” but that it was discarded as “untrustworthy”.

Deputy Chief of Police Anthony McNally explained to Sky News: “We take incidents of this nature very seriously and understand the concern of the community, school communities, students and parents. Investigations are ongoing. However, at the moment, we consider the risk to the public to be low.”.

The Scottish police have stated that the messages have been analyzed and are being treated as false. A police spokesman said that they understood “how distressing messages of this nature can be for students, parents, guardians and school staff, and the concern they can understandably cause,” but “there is no need to evacuate schools or keep children away from education based only on the content of the emails.”.

The news comes at a time when at least about 6,000 schools in Italy, hundreds were evacuated. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that no “concrete danger” has been identified so far. 

The Italian Minister of Education, Giuseppe Valditara, also considered to the television channel La7, that the warnings were probably false.

According to the Italian media, the bomb threat was contained in an ‘e-mail’ signed by “Mikhail Andropov, head of the Vilayat (district) of Misoginistan”.

“ We have come to annihilate you. We are going to commit genocide against the Italian people”, said the signatory of the e-mail message.

“ I just left in your building, inside a plastic bag, a powerful explosive with remote detonation”, added the message addressing Meloni, stating the sender also put a bomb in the Prime Minister’s car.

These new threats against educational institutions arise after a wave of false bomb alerts in recent weeks, including flights to or from Italy, as well as following a series of cyberattacks to supermarket refrigeration systems in Italy and other European countries.

Last month hundreds of schools in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Hungary and Serbia had already been subjected to false bomb threats.

These attacks are causing growing concern in Europe about the possibility of an escalation of the hybrid war.