Schools in Italy, U.K. and Ireland get hoax bomb threats amid concern over hybrid warfare targeting Europe

Rome and London — Thousands of schools across Europe received apparently hoax bomb threats Wednesday, prompting mass evacuations in Italy. The threatening messages were sent to at least 6,300 schools in Italy alone, as well as hundreds in Ireland and across the U.K.

There have been no reports so far of explosives or suspicious devices found at any of the schools, but investigations were continuing. The threats came less than a week after more than 20 European commercial flights got fake bomb threats, forcing many to divert. 

While authorities have not assigned any blame yet for the bomb hoaxes, they are fueling growing concern about the impact of wider hybrid warfare tactics that officials and security experts say Iran and Russia are using to target Europe amid the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Schools in Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Bologna and several other cities were affected, with lessons suspended and precautionary evacuations ordered. Police, bomb disposal specialists and the Postal Police conducted inspections and were investigating the origin of the messages.

Italian news outlets published an email they said was received by the schools across the country on Wednesday claiming to be from “Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan,” a Russian misogynistic extremist group that was banned by authorities in Moscow several years ago.

CBS News confirmed last week that a message attributed to the same name and same group was sent to airport authorities in Rome, threatening two of the flights affected by the mass hoaxes on Nov. 5.

“We have come to annihilate you,” read the email published by Italian media on Wednesday. “I have just left a powerful explosive device with a remote detonator inside a plastic bag in your building.” 

The email also contained threats to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Meloni said there was no “concrete danger” behind the threats, and called it part of “a strategy aimed at causing alarm and concern.”

She called a meeting for later Wednesday with Italian intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts, to discuss the potential connection with recent threats against airlines, and the identification of those responsible.

This is the third wave of bomb threats against Italian schools in a month, following messages received on Oct. 19 and then Nov. 2, when approximately 280 schools got threatening messages, according to Italian media. 

Hundreds of schools in Ireland and across the United Kingdom also received threatening emails Wednesday. 

Ireland’s national police, the Garda, said in a statement that it was “aware of a generic communication that has been sent to a number of educational establishments” but it added that the threat had been deemed “not credible” and that the force was “not advising any educational establishment to evacuate.”

Police in Northern Ireland said emails threatening schools there appeared to have originated outside the United Kingdom.

In addition to the threats to airliners last week, the school threats also come amid international investigations into cyberattacks targeting grocery store refrigeration units in both Europe and the U.S., blood banks in France, and wider “hybrid warfare” sabotage and disruption efforts attributed by Western authorities largely to Russia and Iran.

The New York Times and Reuters reported, meanwhile, that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had relocated from his home in Washington, D.C. to a military base following an Iranian threat to his life. 

Hybrid warfare targeting “people, businesses, communities” 

In October, the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, said security threats facing the U.K. and Europe were evolving, with malicious actors attacking not only things owned and controlled by governments, but also “aiming at people, businesses, communities.”  

“Russia remains aggressor number one,” McCallum said, accusing its military and intelligence services of “once again escalating their attempts at hybrid warfare,” and adding that Moscow was “being careful to stay below the NATO Article 5 threshold” with its actions, which would trigger the alliance’s collective defense principle.

Iran, he said, had made a “major shift” in its efforts to attack the U.K., including going after harder targets such as military bases and “using criminal proxies to try to intimidate oppositionists, Iranian media organizations, and Israeli sites” across Europe.  

Experts told CBS News earlier this year that Russia and Iran were stepping up efforts to recruit sometimes-unwitting criminals to carry out sabotage attacks, often for small payouts.

McCallum noted “a wave of arson and sabotage incidents targeting Jewish communities in the U.K. and other European nations,” but said Iran was also targeting “harder targets, like military sites.”

Many of the attacks on soft targets have been claimed by a group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (HAYI), or the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right, which U.K. authorities have sanctioned and said is tied directly to the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which Britain considers a terrorist organization. 

A CBS News investigation in March found the group appeared to have links to Iran, and a member said it would “keep threatening U.S. and Israeli interests worldwide until we’ve avenged every child in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and the resistance nations … We urge people to stay away from Zionist and American interests and individuals to keep themselves safe.”