Schools in Lithuania received 750 emails on Friday alone, and more were coming in, authorities said. Law enforcement say the Russian-language messages did not exclusively target Jewish institutions.
Police in Lithuania say the country’s schools have been inundated with bomb threats since Friday morning, following a pattern of similar incidents in neighboring countries.
Lithuania’s police chief, Renatas Pozela, said “the coordinated mass attack” that began late on Thursday involved hundreds of emails that were sent from a server within the European Union. The majority of messages were in Russian and some had political content, Pozela said.
In Estonia, a wave of threatening spam emails started late Wednesday. As a result, most schools in Tartu, the country’s second-largest city, were closed on Thursday.
Although hundreds of children in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were told not to come to school because of bomb threats, Lithuanian Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė said there did not appear to be any danger.