During Tuesday, Slovak police registered more than 1,100 threats of bomb attacks across the country. It follows from the police statement that the as yet unknown offender or offenders mainly focused on schools – threats were made to a thousand schools in almost the whole of Slovakia. There are also 110 bank buildings and 40 electrical engineering stores.
According to Slovak media, threats of bomb attacks on schools are dealt with by the National Criminal Agency (NAKA). “We are taking all measures to avoid endangering the lives and health of persons,” informed Roman Hájek, spokesman for the police presidium, around noon. As of 1:00 p.m., the police had registered a total of 995 threats of bomb attacks to specific schools.
“The threats addressed to the schools came from a Russian email address with the ending .ru,” the website Aktuality.sk reported. “The police do not take such threats lightly, that is why, in addition to NAKA members, we have also involved other police forces in the measures. Specifically, pyrotechnics, dog handlers with specially trained service dogs, and riot police units,” explained spokesman Hájek.
As he added, the perpetrator faces twenty to twenty-five years’ imprisonment or life imprisonment for the particularly serious crime of a terrorist attack.
According to the Polish model?
Schools in Poland faced similar large-scale bomb threats in 2019. Hundreds of schools then received a series of empty e-mail threats that disrupted graduation ceremonies. The unprecedented security action upset thousands of high school graduates.
The originator of the threats was not found due to a lack of evidence, and the investigation stopped in the summer of 2020. But the Polish media, referring to sources from the investigation, wrote that accounts used by the Russian military intelligence service GRU and a hybrid war led by Russia were behind the action.
Templates of e-mail threats appeared on profiles used by Russian intelligence together with an invitation to send them to Polish schools. The distribution was then taken care of by Internet users spreading fake news. Some were from fake accounts.
