What happened
Thousands of schools across Italy, Ireland, and the United Kingdom received hoax bomb threats on Wednesday. At least 6,300 schools in Italy were targeted, along with hundreds more in Ireland and the U.K.
Mass evacuations took place in Italy, affecting schools in cities such as Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, and Bologna. Lessons were suspended while police, bomb disposal specialists, and the Postal Police conducted inspections.
No explosives or suspicious devices were found at any of the schools. Authorities are investigating the origin of the messages.
Italian media published an email claiming to be from "Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan," a Russian misogynistic extremist group banned in Moscow. The email threatened to detonate an explosive device and included threats against Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Meloni stated there was no "concrete danger" and described the threats as part of a strategy to cause alarm. She scheduled a meeting with intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts to discuss potential links to recent threats against airlines.
This marks the third wave of bomb threats against Italian schools in a month, following similar messages on October 19 and November 2.
In Ireland, the Garda deemed the threat "not credible" and did not advise evacuations. Police in Northern Ireland said the emails appeared to originate outside the United Kingdom.
The threats occurred less than a week after more than 20 European commercial flights received fake bomb threats. Officials and security experts have linked such incidents to wider hybrid warfare tactics attributed to Iran and Russia.
