Wave of hoax bomb threats sent to schools in UK, Ireland and Italy

At least 6,300 schools in Italy received threatening emails before 10 a.m. Wednesday, prompting mass evacuations, suspended lessons and a rush by parents to collect children. Hundreds of schools in Ireland and across the United Kingdom received similar messages, but police there classified them as hoaxes and advised against evacuation. No explosives or suspicious devices had been reported at any school by Wednesday afternoon.

The scale of the Italian response was extraordinary: schools in Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Bologna and other cities emptied classrooms, while police, bomb-disposal specialists and the Postal Police searched buildings and investigated where the messages came from. The disruption reached beyond the classroom. Nensi Bego, whose daughter attends the Mazzini middle school in Rome, found the child still shaken after being moved to a safe area under staff supervision. “This is so annoying,” she said. “It’s obvious it’s just a hoax that disrupts lessons and disrupts everyone’s day.”

The emails carried a common signature: “Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan,” a name associated with a Russian misogynistic extremist group banned in Moscow several years ago. Copies seen by Reuters also threatened Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The same purported author claimed responsibility for bomb-threat emails sent to newsrooms in Ireland and Bulgaria on Friday. That continuity matters because it links the school campaign to an existing method of disruption rather than treating Wednesday’s messages as an isolated prank.

Yet the evidence does not establish who is behind them. Police Scotland said the email originated outside the UK and was being treated as a hoax. Ireland’s Garda described the communication as generic and not credible, and said it was not advising schools to evacuate. Italy’s education minister, Giuseppe Valditara, said the threats were presumed to be hoaxes, while Meloni said there was no concrete danger and described the aim as creating alarm. Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto offered a broader explanation: the threats were intended to spread fear and anxiety, but could also be the work of attention-seekers or unstable individuals rather than foreign actors.

That uncertainty is the central complication. The school attacks arrived less than a week after more than 20 European commercial flights were subjected to false bomb alerts, causing diversions, fighter-jet escorts and security checks. No explosive devices were found in the aircraft searches reported in Spain, Italy, Poland and Bulgaria. The disruption has since been joined by cyberattacks on supermarket refrigeration systems in Europe and the United States and blood banks in France. France has attributed the refrigerator attacks to an Iranian cyber unit and summoned Tehran’s ambassador; Iran has denied involvement. Western officials have also linked broader sabotage efforts to Russia, which denies the accusations.

The pattern has prompted concern about hybrid warfare, but the school emails should not be folded into that category without proof. A national security source told Reuters that publishing the school emails made sending them “as easy as drinking a glass of water.” That points to a low-cost method for producing disruption: one message can trigger police deployments, searches and family anxiety across thousands of institutions. The burden of proof runs in the opposite direction from the alarm.

Italy has now seen three waves of school bomb threats in a month, including messages on Oct. 19 and Nov. 2 that reached about 280 schools. Antonello Giannelli, head of the Italian School Principals Association, said the consequences should not be dismissed even when the threats are clearly false. The unresolved question is whether investigators can trace the messages to a coordinated actor, or whether Europe is learning to live with a cheap weapon that can repeatedly pull children, parents and public services away from ordinary life.