Bomb threats against multiple Czech schools via coordinated email campaign

Returning Czech schoolchildren faced a wave of coordinated bomb-threat emails at the start of the 2024/2025 school year. According to CEPA, threatening messages reached hundreds of Czech schools on consecutive days including 28, 29 and 30 August 2024, forcing repeated classroom evacuations during the first week of term. The emails claimed buildings had been "mined," warned of explosions around noon, referenced a Telegram contact, and invoked the "Dnipropetrovsk maniacs." A Czech linguist cited by CEPA assessed the Czech-language text appeared machine-translated from a Russian or Ukrainian original.

The campaign intensified in early September. Radio Prague International and expats.cz reported that around 450 Czech schools received threatening emails on 3 September, with further rounds the following days; nearly 270 schools in neighbouring Slovakia were targeted in parallel. Czech police and the National Center for Combating Terrorism, Extremism and Cybercrime led the response, stating they had no specific information that anyone was in danger. No explosives or devices were found at any site. Balkan Insight reported that Interior Minister Vít Rakušan described the wave as an unprecedented, coordinated attack from abroad. The emails closely resembled earlier mass bomb-threat campaigns directed against Ukrainian schools.

The threats appear to have been a coordinated email campaign designed to disrupt schooling and spread fear rather than to detonate devices; no explosives were ever found. Czech officials and analysts assessed a probable Russia link: secret service (BIS) chief Michal Koudelka told parliament there was a "clearly visible Russian trace" behind the school threats in Czechia and Slovakia. Linguistic indicators, the Telegram and Dnipropetrovsk references, and strong similarity to prior Russia-attributed campaigns in Ukraine support this assessment. Attribution remains an official suspicion rather than a court-proven finding, and should be treated as assessed, not conclusively established.