June 02, 2022

A wave of bomb threats spreads panic through the Balkans

topic:	Security
located:	Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
editor:	Katarina Panić

After receiving emailed bomb threats, more than four hundred schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina were evacuated yesterday morning. By noon, most of them were checked by police bomb squads, reopened and continued working as if nothing had happened - but the fear remained. 

The panic spread through the schools as fast as the cyberattack did. After the incident, the school staff did not inform or educate the schoolchildren about the bomb threat since no one was prepared for situations like this. Therefore, the children have been creating their own versions of the story, without adult explanations by either teachers or experts. The parents have also not known how to approach the issue - so they have chosen to simplify the topic as much as possible, mostly explaining that it was only a matter of a false alarm. However, the ombudsman for children warned that it is vital to know how to talk to children during a crisis.

“In the absence of adequate information, children are at risk of creating the wrong version of events, which can be disastrous. They talk about events among themselves and thus fill the gap of information that is missing,” Gordana Rajić, Republika Srpska Ombudsman for Children, told local media.

The prosecutors’ offices qualified the act as a false reporting of a criminal offence, while part of the public believed it was and act of terrorism. This morning, one of the biggest hospitals in the country was evacuated over a similar bomb threat email. 

“We thought it was hard to watch pupils running out of the schools yesterday. And then today, we saw the newborn babies with their crying mothers in front [of the Clinical Centre},” one Banjaluka citizen told local media. 

This email also turned out to be a false alarm, and patients were back in the clinique by noon. Yet now, people worry about what the next threat will be. 

The wave of false bomb threats has also been affecting neighbouring Serbia for months, and the state must investigate every single case, which is time and staff consuming, expensive and exhausting. The threats in Serbia began targeting aeroplanes and airports three months ago, soon after Russia had attacked Ukraine. It is believed that they were triggered by the Serbian authorities’ decision not to dismiss regular flights between Belgrade and Moscow. Since then, the bomb threats have been spreading, firstly all over Serbia, and afterwards over the rest of the Balkan region. The Serbian Ministry of Interior has found that the emails were sent from at least seven countries. At this point, it seems like a never-ending story of panic. 

Photo by Michael Schiffer

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