Bomb alert in hundreds of Italian schools today, 11 November: from Milan to Rome, passing through Naples, Potenza and Venice, numerous institutes received an anonymous email announcing the presence of explosive devices in the buildings, triggering the precautionary evacuation of students and staff. At the moment, however, there are no injuries and checks and possible clean-ups by the police are underway, with the intervention of the police, carabinieri and bomb squad in the reported schools.
On her social channels, the Prime Minister then clarified that “at the moment, from the checks carried out, no element emerges that suggests the existence of a concrete danger”.
The message arrived in the institutional inboxes shortly before 10:00 and, according to what has been reconstructed, it is identical in all the institutions involved: it was signed by “Mikhail Andropov”, who defines himself as “leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan”. According to the latest information released by the Ministry of Education, the e-mail would have reached around 6,000 Italian schools, but not all of them would have ordered the evacuation (even after consulting the Postal Police).
In the text of the email the author claims to have left “a powerful explosive device with remote trigger inside a plastic bag”, adding explicit death threats towards students and staff, “we have come to destroy you”.
The message also contains a direct threat to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which however is not specifically mentioned, but indicated with a more generic “we have placed a bomb in the engine of your prime minister’s car”. The President has organized an emergency meeting for today, at 4 pm, in which the two deputy prime ministers Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini, the Minister of the Interior Matteo Piantedosi and the Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto, the undersecretary of the Prime Minister Alfredo Mantovano and the heads of intelligence and the National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN) will participate.
The nature of the threat, at the moment, remains to be clarified: given the common matrix of the reports, i.e. the same text delivered simultaneously to a large number of institutions, the investigators’ suspicion is that it could be a new cyber attack against the Italian school system, rather than a real threat. According to what was reported by the principals of some institutions that received the report, the e-mail address it is already classified as spam by one student at Taiwan University.
As Alessandro Marrone, an expert at the Institute for International Affairs, explained to Geopop, bomb scares are new types of hybrid attacks that cause the population to perceive a perception of insecurity, disorientation and distrust in institutions. As with the bomb scares in recent weeks regarding some flights, the reports later turned out to be false, but still led to the activation of security procedures and controls which entailed a cost not only for the operators, but also and above all for the public perception of insecurity.
Today’s alerts followed the same methods in many cities: in general, the map of alerts (certainly destined to expand in the next few hours with the arrival of new news) goes from Friuli-Venezia Giulia to Campania and from the Po Valley to Sicily, confirming the national and coordinated nature of the dispatch.
According to what was communicated by the Minister of Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, who spoke at The Air That Pulls on La7, around 312 bomb alerts were triggered in schools throughout Italy: the Minister asked not to create alarmism “because it is clear from the content of the e-mail that the concrete risk is almost non-existent: it is a cyber attack, not a real risk in all likelihood, but the strategy must be thought of involving the Services”.
Despite being a small part of the over 63,000 Italian institutions, the schools involved have suffered evacuations and suspension of lessons, with strong repercussions on school organization and, above all, on fears for the safety of students, teachers and staff.
The cities in which, based on the reports that have emerged so far, there have been bomb alerts linked to the anonymous email are:
- Trieste, Gorizia and various locations in Friuli-Venezia Giulia;
- Venice and Padua for the Veneto;
- Milan, Brescia, Bergamo, Lodi, Varese, Pavia, Mantua and some areas of Cremona in Lombardy;
- Turin, Alessandria, Novara, Vercelli and the Verbano-Cusio-Ossola areas in Piedmont;
- Bologna and Modena in Emilia-Romagna;
- Rome, Rieti, Frosinone and Viterbo as regards Lazio;
- Naples in Campania;
- Power for Basilicata;
- Catanzaro and Cosenza in Calabria;
- Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento, Catania, Enna, Ragusa and Syracuse as regards schools in Sicily.
- Sassari, Carbonia and Iglesias in Sardinia.
The list is partial and being updated: other provinces are being added while checks by the police continue.
In reality, Italy is not the only country to have been affected: hundreds of schools were also evacuated in Northern Ireland and Scotland after receiving a bomb threat, again via email.
