Several schools in Italy were evacuated on Thursday after receiving emailed bomb threats, while a bomb alert at the Calais-Fréthun railway station in northern France temporarily halted train traffic and delayed Eurostar services. No explosives were reported found in either incident.
Reuters, citing the Italian news agency ANSA, reported that the emails threatening that explosive devices had been planted resembled messages sent to schools across the country on Wednesday. Those earlier messages triggered a wide-scale wave of evacuations and searches.
Italy's Education Ministry said more than 6,300 schools received threatening messages in Wednesday's wave. Hundreds of institutions were evacuated, and police and bomb disposal units were called in. Searches found no explosive device and no real danger.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the senders aimed to spread fear, create chaos and disrupt daily life. She said Italian authorities were working with law enforcement agencies in other European countries to track down those responsible.
In France, the bomb alert at Calais-Fréthun came at a station close to the Channel Tunnel, which links France and Britain. Local authorities said security checks were underway and warned of disruption to rail traffic.
Eurostar said that, on the instructions of French authorities, trains were not permitted to pass through the station for the time being, causing delays to some services between London and Paris. Traffic on the local line between Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer was also suspended after a report of luggage left unattended at the station.
The incidents follow recent bomb threats against flights to and from Israel. According to Kikar HaShabbat, security experts say the string of hoax bomb alerts against aircraft and in various countries points to a troubling "pattern." The experts acknowledged that no link between the incidents has been proven but argued that the wider context cannot be ignored.
The experts told the outlet that the false alarms are not intended merely to sow chaos and panic among Europeans. In their view, terrorist elements are behind the threats, with the goal of lulling security services into complacency ahead of a day when a real bomb is planted on a plane or at a train station.
They argued that the method exploits human nature. Even if authorities make every effort to stay fully alert and treat each warning as genuine, a long series of hoaxes could leave security forces unprepared when a real attack comes.
