At least 300 schools across Italy were evacuated on Wednesday, November 11, after the same emailed bomb threat reached schools around the country, Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said checks had found no indication of any concrete danger, and no explosive device had been reported found.

Source: Reuters via The Oldham Times

Valditara, speaking on the La7 television channel, said at least 300 schools had received the email and that the number could rise. He later put the figure at 312, according to Corriere della Sera reporting cited in later updates. The Education Ministry said the email reached about 6,300 of Italy's roughly 7,500 state schools — a far larger recipient count than the number actually evacuated — and private schools were not affected.

Source: Reuters via Barbados Gazette

Meloni convened a meeting of senior ministers at Palazzo Chigi in Rome for 4 p.m. on Wednesday. In a statement she said the government was closely monitoring the reports, that checks so far had revealed no evidence of a concrete danger, and that the threats appeared intended to generate alarm and concern.

Valditara described the alerts as presumed hoaxes. "There is no need for alarmism as the content of the emails makes it clear that any concrete risk is virtually nonexistent. In all likelihood, this is a cyberattack rather than a genuine threat," he said, in remarks reported by Reuters.

Reuters said it had seen a copy of the email signed "Mikhail Andropov" — the same signature reported on recent threats to Irish and Bulgarian newsrooms and, in other reporting, to European broadcasters and flights the previous week. No link between the cases has been established by investigators, and the sender has not been identified.

The disruption was not limited to Italy. Authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland also reported similar alerts on Wednesday: more than 700 schools across Scotland and Northern Ireland received threats, according to local authorities cited by the BBC, and police in Northern Ireland said more than 300 schools there had received a threatening email they were treating as a hoax. Those are counts of schools that received threats, not of schools evacuated.

A similar emailed warning had disrupted more than 200 schools the previous week, including many in Rome, officials said. Wednesday's alert came amid wider European concern about hybrid threats, after supermarket refrigeration systems, blood-bank cold storage, air traffic and broadcasters were targeted in recent weeks — a context Italian officials themselves raised, without attributing Wednesday's email to any state or group.

Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, who was at a public event as the threats emerged, said the wave of emails was part of a campaign to create panic and disruption in European countries, according to reporting of his remarks. That is an official's characterisation, not a finding: police investigations are under way and no culprit has been named.

What happens next

Pupils were allowed to return to class at many schools after the alarm was lifted and checks were completed, reporting said. Investigators are examining the email's origin and whether it is connected to the earlier hoax waves in Europe. For Punjabi and Indian families in Italy — one of Europe's largest Indian diaspora communities, concentrated in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Lazio — Wednesday meant sudden school closures, children sent home mid-day and workdays interrupted, even though officials say no real device existed.