Thousands of schools in Italy, and more than 700 in Scotland and Northern Ireland, received bomb-threat emails this week in what officials describe as a suspected hoax, the BBC reported. In Italy, a number of buildings were evacuated on Wednesday as a precaution. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said checks so far had not indicated any "concrete danger." "These reports appear rather linked to a strategy intended to cause alarm and concern," she said.
Italian officials said a single email appeared to have been sent on Wednesday to 6,300 of the country's 7,476 state schools. Private schools were unaffected. The message was said to be from a "Mikhail Andropov, leader of Vilayat di Misoginistan." The BBC said a similar wording, also using the name Mikhail Andropov, went to Scottish schools, though that version referred to a "Red Owl" project. It is unclear whether the Italian and U.K. incidents are connected. Scotland's education secretary, Mairi McAllan, said there was no risk to the public and that specialist cyber-crime officers were working to identify the source. Police Scotland said the warnings were "immediately assessed" as hoaxes and that there was "no requirement to evacuate schools or keep children away from education based solely on the content of the emails." Some local authorities confirmed that some schools were evacuated anyway.
The scare returned on Thursday. Some 3,778 Italian schools, from Milan to Sicily, reported similar threats, though no explosive devices were found, the BBC reported. The government advised that "in the absence of concrete evidence beyond the simple receipt of a mass email indicating a danger, buildings must not not be evacuated." Unlike Wednesday, only 77 schools were evacuated on Thursday, authorities said. A similar Thursday message, again signed by Mikhail Andropov, was said to have been sent from the hacked account of a teacher in the Philippines. Some officials have said Wednesday's email originated in Taiwan. A Milan head teacher, Massimo Nunzio Barrella, told Adnkronos he treated the first message as spam, saying the text "seemed almost comical."
The school emails follow a series of bomb hoaxes last week against airports and airlines in several European countries. An extremist misogynistic group claimed some of those threats and later denied any link. A bomb alert at a Calais rail station on Thursday delayed trains in northern France. Meloni said her government would issue "sector-specific" advice. The verified facts are narrower than the panic: mass emails, no devices found, and a second day of threats that produced far fewer evacuations once officials told schools not to empty buildings on an email alone.