A single anonymous email emptied hundreds of schools across Italy on Wednesday morning and then spread to schools in Northern Ireland, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, in the widest school bomb scare Europe has seen in its current wave of hoax threats. The message, which reached Italian school inboxes at around 9:50 a.m. under the subject line "danger warning," claimed a powerful explosive device had been left in a plastic bag ready to be detonated remotely, threatened Italians and claimed a bomb had been planted in the car of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, according to a copy seen by Reuters. It was signed "Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan." From Rome and Milan to Naples, Potenza and Udine, schools were evacuated and lessons halted while police and bomb disposal teams checked the buildings. Nothing was found anywhere, and in many schools students were back in class by the afternoon.
Italy counted the scale of it through the day. Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara first put the number of schools that received the threat at about 300; the Education Ministry's updated count later put the figure at some 6,000 schools reached by the email — Reuters reported around 6,300 warnings — with many, though not all, evacuated. Valditara said the content of the email made a concrete risk virtually nonexistent and that this was, in all likelihood, a cyberattack rather than a genuine threat. Meloni said there was no indication of any concrete danger to schools and that the threats appeared aimed at generating alarm and concern, adding that her government was following the situation very closely and doing everything necessary to keep citizens safe.
The same morning, the scare jumped the sea. In Northern Ireland, more than 300 schools received the same emailed threat; the Police Service of Northern Ireland said the message originated outside the United Kingdom and is being treated as a hoax, that checks had found nothing untoward, and that the risk to the public is low — Assistant Chief Constable Anthony McNally said enquiries are ongoing and schools were advised to remain open, though one County Down primary school evacuated briefly before reopening. The PSNI noted the message resembled a bogus threat sent to schools there last month. Police Scotland said threatening messages sent to schools were assessed immediately and are being treated as hoaxes, advising that the emails alone do not warrant evacuation, while its cyber and fraud unit works to trace the source. In the Republic of Ireland, police said a generic communication had gone to a number of schools and was assessed as not credible, with no evacuations advised; at one Dublin school that received the threat late in the morning, the day simply went ahead as normal.
Meloni answered with the top of her government. She convened a late-afternoon summit at Palazzo Chigi with her deputy prime ministers Matteo Salvini and Antonio Tajani, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano and the heads of the intelligence services and the National Cybersecurity Agency to review the situation and coordinate the response. Prosecutors in Genoa opened a case file over the alerts at some twenty schools in that city, examining alarm-raising, interruption of public service and serious threats, possibly aggravated by a terrorist purpose, with the postal police and the Digos tracing where the email came from. The same purported author had already claimed responsibility for email bomb threats sent on Friday to newsrooms in Ireland and Bulgaria. No arrests have been reported.
The scare is the latest in a series rolling across Europe: hoax bomb threats against airlines and broadcasters in recent weeks and cyberattacks on supermarkets, blood banks and air traffic before that. Some European officials suspect Russia is running a campaign of disruption against the countries backing Ukraine; Moscow denies it and accuses the West of a smear campaign. Iran has also been accused — France summoned its ambassador over a cyberattack that disabled refrigerators in hundreds of supermarkets — and Tehran rejected the charge as baseless. The European Union said last week it was too early to tell whether the incidents are linked. Crosetto called Wednesday's threats part of a clear strategy to spread fear and create anxiety, while cautioning that not every case is a foreign state — there are also attention-seekers ready to unleash terror in a city.
For families, none of this was abstract. Italian schools closed swiftly and parents dropped what they were doing to collect their children; one Rome mother described her daughter crying because the children did not understand what was happening, still shaken when she was picked up. Italy's school principals association warned that even threats that are clearly hoaxes alarm entire school communities and disrupt education. What parents in four countries got from their authorities on Wednesday was one consistent message — police in Italy, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Ireland all call it a hoax, the risk is low, and schools stay open — because the sender's weapon was never a bomb. It was the panic itself, and the lost school day multiplied by thousands.
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