Hoax bomb threats hit thousands of schools across Europe

The threatening emails landed in inboxes across Italy on Wednesday, hitting at least 6,300 schools and forcing lessons to stop. Precautionary evacuations were ordered in Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Bologna and other cities while police, bomb disposal specialists and the Postal Police swept buildings and hunted for the source. Nothing has turned up so far: no explosives, no suspicious devices, though checks were still running.

Italian outlets published the email they say schools received, signed by a figure calling himself Mikhail Andropov, described as head of the Vilayat of Misoginistan — a Russian misogynistic extremist outfit banned in Moscow years ago. The message warned, 'We have come to annihilate you,' and claimed a powerful explosive with a remote detonator had been left in a plastic bag inside the building. It also threatened Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who said there was no 'concrete danger' and called the campaign 'a strategy aimed at causing alarm and concern.'

Meloni scheduled a Wednesday meeting with Italian intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts to look at links to the airline threats and to identify who is behind them. It's the third wave aimed at Italian schools in a month: roughly 280 schools got threatening messages on Nov. 2, after an earlier round on Oct. 19, according to Italian media.

Ireland's national police, the Garda, said it knew about a 'generic communication' sent to several educational establishments but judged the threat 'not credible' and was not advising schools to evacuate. Police in Northern Ireland said the emails threatening schools there appear to have come from outside the UK. Hundreds of schools in Ireland and Britain received messages too.

Wednesday's hoaxes arrived less than a week after more than 20 European commercial flights were hit with fake bomb threats, forcing many to divert. CBS News confirmed a message bearing the same Andropov name and group went to Rome airport authorities, threatening two of the flights targeted on Nov. 5. No one has been formally blamed yet, but the wave is feeding alarm over hybrid warfare tactics that officials and security experts tie to Iran and Russia.

The school threats also overlap with international probes into cyberattacks on grocery store refrigeration systems in Europe and the U.S. and on blood banks in France — sabotage Western authorities largely attribute to Russia and Iran. Separately, the New York Times and Reuters reported that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent moved from his Washington, D.C. home to a military base after an Iranian threat against his life.