"Too Scared to Go to Europe" Bomb Threat Scare Targets Schools and Even Aircraft... Anxiety Spreads

Bomb threats across Italy and the United Kingdom
Unease spreads following refrigerator hacks

AP Yonhap News

Students in Italy and the UK were hurriedly evacuated after threatening emails claimed that more than 7,000 schools across the two countries would be bombed. Authorities later found the threats to be false, but anxiety continues to grow. European security agencies have launched investigations into possible involvement by Russia, Iran and others.

According to the BBC on Wednesday (local time), Italy's Ministry of Education received a fake threatening email claiming that bombs had been planted in about 6,300 schools across the country. On the same day, emails threatened to bomb 300 schools in Northern Ireland and 470 in Scotland. Dozens of flights traveling between the UK, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria and Czechia, as well as media outlets in the UK, Ireland and Bulgaria, were also hit by a series of false bomb threats that day.

Security authorities in Italy and the UK first notified parents of the situation and evacuated students and school staff. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni convened an emergency government meeting to assess the situation. The UK government also dispatched police officers and ordered evacuations at some schools. Subsequent investigations found that the bomb threats were false.

Security agencies in the countries concerned believe the incident was carried out by an external force seeking to spread fear in Europe. Northern Ireland's police said they had determined that the emails in question were sent from outside the UK. At a press conference on Wednesday, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said, "It is clearly part of a strategy to create fear and confusion in European countries."

The perpetrators and their motives have yet to be identified, but observers in Europe and elsewhere suspect the incident may have been a hybrid attack or act of sabotage by Russia, Iran or other parties. Suspicions that the attack was carried out by an external force hostile to Europe have grown after French authorities last month named Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as the party behind a hack that targeted supermarket refrigerators nationwide.

Meanwhile, since last month, a series of incidents have occurred in at least 11 European countries, including France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden and Ireland, in which hackers breached the refrigeration and freezer systems of major supermarkets and sharply raised their internal temperatures.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.