Crimeupdated 20m ago2 min read
Italy Evacuates 312 Schools After Emailed Bomb Threat, Meloni Says No Concrete Danger
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Approximately 300 Italian schools evacuated after an emailed bomb threat. Hundreds of schools in Ireland and the UK were warned or evacuated.
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Italy evacuates schools
Italian authorities evacuated 312 schools after an emailed bomb threat, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said there was no indication of any “concrete danger” to schools. Italian Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said “312 schools had been evacuated after receiving email threats,” as students at Rome’s Mamiani high school poured into the streets after mistaking the alarm for the recess bell.
Police Scotland said it was treating similar messages as hoaxes and that “Our assessment remains that they do not represent a credible threat,” while Northern Ireland police said they were conducting “urgent inquiries” after a threatening email was sent to hundreds of schools. Italian officials said a single email appeared to have been sent on Wednesday to the inboxes of 6,300 out of a total of 7,476 state schools, and private schools were unaffected, according to the BBC.
Threats spread across UK
Police in Northern Ireland said they were investigating “menacing emails” sent to over 300 schools and originating from a source “external to the United Kingdom,” while Scotland’s education secretary Mairi McAllan said there was no risk to the public. Northern Ireland education officials told schools to remain open unless otherwise advised by police, and Police Scotland said schools had “no requirement to evacuate schools or keep children away from education based solely on the content of the emails.”
The BBC reported that the message, said to be from “Mikhail Andropov, leader of Vilayat di Misoginistan,” caused alarm in many schools, and Italian officials said the same signature had appeared among claims of threats to European flights. A Milan headteacher, Anna Bertato, told Italian media that she had checked the email address of the sender online and said, “It was already classified as spam by a student at a university in Taiwan.”
Hybrid warfare concerns
Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said the emailed threats were aimed at “sowing terror, or creating concern,” as authorities investigated the origin of the messages. The BBC said Scotland’s education secretary Mairi McAllan stated specialist cyber-crime officers were working to identify the source of the messages, while Italian officials said the incidents appeared linked to a strategy intended to cause alarm and concern.
The BBC reported that it was unclear whether the incidents were connected, and it said extremist misogynistic group claims were later denied any link to the false warnings. The CBS News report said the threats came less than a week after more than 20 flights were forced to divert, and it quoted an email published by Italian media that read, “We have come to annihilate you.”