Rome and London — Thousands of schools across Europe received apparently hoax bomb threats Wednesday, prompting mass evacuations in Italy. The threatening messages were sent to at least 6,300 schools in Italy alone, as well as hundreds in Ireland and across the U.K.
There have been no reports so far of explosives or suspicious devices found at any of the schools, but investigations were continuing. The threats came less than a week after more than 20 European commercial flights got fake bomb threats, forcing many to divert.
While authorities have not assigned any blame yet for the bomb hoaxes, they are fueling growing concern about the impact of wider hybrid warfare tactics that officials and security experts say Iran and Russia are using to target Europe amid the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Schools in Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Bologna and several other cities were affected, with lessons suspended and precautionary evacuations ordered. Police, bomb disposal specialists and the Postal Police conducted inspections and were investigating the origin of the messages.
Italian news outlets published an email they said was received by the schools across the country on Wednesday claiming to be from “Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan,” a Russian misogynistic extremist group that was banned by authorities in Moscow several years ago.
CBS News confirmed last week that a message attributed to the same name and same group was sent to airport authorities in Rome, threatening two of the flights affected by the mass hoaxes on Nov. 5.
“We have come to annihilate you,” read the email published by Italian media on Wednesday. “I have just left a powerful explosive device with a remote detonator inside a plastic bag in your building.”
The email also contained threats to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Meloni said there was no “concrete danger” behind the threats, and called it part of “a strategy aimed at causing alarm and concern.”
She called a meeting for later Wednesday with Italian intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts, to discuss the potential connection with recent threats against airlines, and the identification of those responsible.
This is the third wave of bomb threats against Italian schools in a month, following messages received on Oct. 19 and then Nov. 2, when approximately 280 schools got threatening messages, according to Italian media.
Hundreds of schools in Ireland and across the United Kingdom also received threatening emails Wednesday.
Ireland’s national police, the Garda, said in a statement that it was “aware of a generic communication that has been sent to a number of educational establishments” but it added that the threat had been deemed “not credible” and that the force was “not advising any educational establishment to evacuate.”
Police in Northern Ireland said emails threatening schools there appeared to have originated outside the United Kingdom.
In addition to the threats to airliners last week, the school threats also come amid international investigations into cyberattacks targeting grocery store refrigeration units in both Europe and the U.S., blood banks in France, and wider “hybrid warfare” sabotage and disruption efforts attributed by Western authorities largely to Russia and Iran.
The New York Times and Reuters reported, meanwhile, that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had relocated from his home in Washington, D.C. to a military base following an Iranian threat to his life.
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