Hoax bomb emails empty hundreds of Italian schools and reach hundreds more in the UK and Ireland

Documented: On 11 November 2026, an identical emailed bomb warning reached about 6,300 Italian state schools — the large majority of the country’s roughly 7,476 state schools — and prompted evacuations at at least 300 to 312 of them, according to Italy’s education ministry and reporting by Reuters, the BBC, and CNN. Similar messages reached schools in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland the same morning. Police Scotland said its enquiries found nothing to suggest a credible threat and advised that the emails alone did not require evacuation; the Police Service of Northern Ireland and An Garda Síochána likewise treated the alerts as hoaxes and did not advise schools to close. Some Scottish schools were still emptied as a local precaution. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said checks had found no element suggesting a concrete danger and described the alerts as appearing linked to a strategy meant to generate alarm. Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said the sheer number of targets showed the threat’s low credibility and called it a probable cyber-attack rather than a genuine device risk. Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said the aim was to spread fear, while cautioning that the senders could be attention-seekers rather than a hostile state. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said it was premature to speak of a single direction behind the messages.

Claimed, not independently verified as authorship: Italian outlets including Il Fatto Quotidiano and Corriere della Sera, and a copy of the message seen by Reuters, report that the Italian email was signed “Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan” and included the line “We have come to annihilate you,” a claim of a genocide against Italians, a description of a powerful device left in a plastic bag with a remote detonator, and a claim that a bomb had been placed in the engine of the prime minister’s car. The BBC reported that Scottish copies used similar wording but referred to the same name as leader of a “Red Owl” project. Italian reporting says the message closely tracked an earlier 2 November email to 271 Italian schools that had been signed as Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and that the Andropov name had also been attached to bomb threats against flights and to newsrooms in Ireland and Bulgaria in the days before. ANSA and Corriere reported that preliminary checks pointed to a compromised account at Taiwan’s Dayeh University. No authority has confirmed who controlled that account or who wrote the text.

Speculated, not established: Officials and news organisations have placed the school emails in a wider run of disruptions — hoax bomb threats against flights, and attacks or threats aimed at supermarkets, blood banks, air traffic, and broadcasters — that some European figures describe as a campaign to interrupt daily life. Reuters noted that Iran and Russia have denied trying to harm daily life in Europe in that broader context. Crosetto’s public caution, and Piantedosi’s refusal to assert a common direction, are the documented limits of what governments have said. The invented “Vilayat of Misoginistan,” the recycled Soviet-era surname, and the rotating claimed affiliations (jihadist province, Revolutionary Guards, “Male State,” “Red Owl”) are consistent with a hoax signature designed to look geopolitical; they are not evidence of any of those groups.

What the day actually did: parents in Italian cities were called to collect children, bomb-disposal teams searched buildings, and lessons stopped even though no device was reported found. In the UK and Ireland the same text mostly failed to empty classrooms once police labelled it not credible — a split that shows how a mass email to public school inboxes can still force a real response when local officials will not risk being wrong, and how little technical sophistication is required when the address lists are already public. A national security source told Reuters that sending the alerts was “as easy as drinking a glass of water.”