Bomb alerts at 6,300 schools: 24 hours on, schools reopen. The open questions
According to Italian officials quoted by the BBC, the threatening email reached 6,300 state schools out of 7,476. No device was found; Meloni: 'no concrete danger'.
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- According to Italian officials quoted by the BBC, the threatening email reached 6,300 state schools out of 7,476; private schools were not affected.
- Buildings evacuated on the day have reopened and bomb disposal experts found no devices; Prime Minister Meloni said there was "no concrete danger".
- More than 700 schools in Scotland and Northern Ireland received similar messages, assessed by authorities as hoaxes; it is unclear whether the cases are connected.
Italian schools reopened on a normal day. That is the practical outcome of the twenty-four hours in which a single anonymous email, with bomb threats, reached the inboxes of 6,300 state schools out of 7,476, as Italian officials told the BBC.
The figures in circulation must be kept apart. The education ministry spoke of "around six thousand" schools; the BBC, citing the same offices, reports 6,300 out of 7,476 state schools, noting that private schools were not affected. They are two estimates of the same phenomenon, not two conflicting versions: the second is more precise and comes from those who did the counting.
What was found
No device. The alert led to several buildings being evacuated as a precaution and to checks by bomb disposal teams; during the day pupils returned to class across almost every region, from Puglia to Piedmont, and the following day lessons took place as usual.
This is where precision matters: nothing was found does not mean the alarm was groundless, nor that there was anything to find. It means the checks produced no result, and that prosecutors are still working on it: a case file was opened in Genoa, and the lines of inquiry in circulation — a single hand, copycats, disinformation — are hypotheses, not conclusions. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi put it in the words that should stand: "It is premature to speak of a common direction".
The voice that has to reassure
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in a video posted on social media in the afternoon, separated two levels: "To date there is no element indicating a concrete danger", but also "These messages are not meant to hit, they are meant to frighten". She then added a sentence that is a commitment not to speculate: "I will not make hypotheses; when there are certainties, you will know".
In the same hours Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara spoke of "300 bomb alerts across Italy, non-existent risk", while Defence Minister Guido Crosetto spoke of a "strategy of terror but also mythomaniacs". The two readings — coordinated operation or imitation — were lined up in parliament by opposition parties, who asked for clarity over "conflicting versions from ministers". The political disagreement is a fact of the day and is reported as such, without taking sides.
Outside Italy, and the name in the emails
According to the BBC, more than 700 schools in Scotland and Northern Ireland received similar messages. Police Scotland assessed them "immediately" as hoaxes, and Northern Ireland officials told schools to stay open unless advised otherwise; in Scotland, where some sites were evacuated anyway, education secretary Mairi McAllan said there was no risk to the public. "It is unclear whether the incidents are connected," the BBC writes: that is the limit of the reconstruction and it must be said.
One detail, finally, that our manual requires us to declare: the signatory of the email does not even have a single name across sources. When quoting the message itself, ANSA attributes the signature to "Mikhail Antropov, leader of Vilayat di Misoginistan"; when discussing parallels with other European episodes, the same agency writes "Mikhail Andropov". The BBC reports "Andropov". We do not reproduce the threats in full: it is enough to know they were bomb threats, and that investigators and prosecutors are working on who wrote them and where they came from.
False alarms have another example in the archive: the polar bear that announced an empty month; and for readers interested in safety rules, the network has also covered the 48-hour notice for airport assistance.