© AFP
Nearly 130 French secondary schools received a threat of attack or other “hostile activity” last week via their digital infrastructure. The Ministry of Education announced this on Monday.
This concerns schools in the regions of Ile-de-France, Hauts-de-France and Grand Est. The rectorate of the Académie de Reims, the educational area in Grand Est, announced that a dozen schools were threatened via their hacked digital infrastructure. According to the rectorate, some messages contained a video of a beheading, similar to the messages received last week in Ile-de-France.
“They think they remain anonymous, but we track them down. They think they are safe, but we punish them. A case has already been filed against dozens of perpetrators of these threats in recent months,” French Prime Minister Fabriel Attal said on Thursday evening after a ministerial meeting on safety in schools.
By mid-November, the government had counted 800 hoax bomb threats, in what was an earlier wave of bomb threats in the fall. The number of reports increased, especially after the Muslim extremist attack on October 13 in Arras on teacher Dominique Bernard.