Some 6,300 schools across Italy have received bomb threats, according to government in Rome, and Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara has said the incidents are probably a “cyber-attack, not a genuine risk”.
Valditara told Italian TV that there was a clear strategy behind the rash of threats in Italy and elsewhere in Europe which had targeted flights, supermarkets and even hospitals.
Separately, more than 700 schools in Scotland and Northern Ireland also received hoax bomb threats. It is unclear whether any of the incidents are connected.
In Italy a number of buildings were evacuated as a precaution but Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said checks so far had not indicated any evidence of “concrete danger”.
“These reports appear rather linked to a strategy intended to cause alarm and concern,” she said on Facebook.
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.
The message, said to be from a certain “Mikhail Andropov, leader of Vilayat di Misoginistan”, caused alarm in many schools.
In Scotland, police said at least 470 schools had received the email but that the warnings were “immediately assessed” as hoaxes and there was nothing to suggest a credible threat.
In Northern Ireland education officials told schools to remain open unless otherwise advised by police after 300 threats were received. Last month a number of schools closed after receiving an emailed threat.
Italian airports along with airlines elsewhere in Europe were hit by a series of bomb hoaxes last week that prompted a series of scares, evacuations and widespread disruption. Although a number of threats were claimed by an extremist misogynistic group, it later denied any link to the false warnings.
On Wednesday one Milan headteacher, Anna Bertato, told Italian media she had checked the email address of the sender online: “It was already classified as spam by a student at a university in Taiwan.”
Another Milan headteacher, Massimo Nunzio Barrella, told Adnkronos news agency that he had immediately realised the email was spam when it arrived in his inbox at 08:59 and he decided not to evacuate his school and reassured parents who phoned in.
“The text seemed almost comical,” said Barrella, “it was like a message from Martians: ‘We have come to annihilate you.’ I even had a bit of a laugh.”
Although many schools were initially evacuated on Wednesday, the alarm was quickly lifted, and pupils were allowed to return to class. Some parents decided to take their children home for the day, but the majority of schools in Milan did not send their pupils home.
Some 280 school head teachers had already received threats in recent days, according to Italian reports.
In a statement, the head of the central Umbria region Stefania Proietti said “checks conducted so far in Umbrian schools have proved negative, and law enforcement is working rapidly and carefully to verify each report”.
