In recent days, an outbreak of alarms has been affecting schools throughout France. Messages threatening an imminent attack have most often been sent via the school district's "ENT" ("digital workspace") in-house messaging system, which enables students and teachers to communicate with each other. As a result of these threats, schools have been evacuated or locked down; law enforcement agencies and specialized units called in to "clear up suspicions"; and an atmosphere of anxiety has unsettled students, teachers and their families alike.
On Thursday, March 28, the Paris education authority sent a message to parents, mentioning that "around fifty schools" had received messages containing bomb threats via the "Paris Digital Classroom" messaging service. Some of the messages were accompanied by "very violent" videos. The messaging system has been closed to students, and a legal complaint is underway.
On Thursday morning, the Augustin-Thierry high school, in Blois, central France, was closed for part of the morning to allow time for bomb disposal teams to intervene. Some students had received threatening e-mails the evening before. The same went for the Bucaille-Charcot middle school in the Normandy port city of Cherbourg, which was closed all morning after threats were posted on the ENT on Wednesday evening, requiring police to carry out a search.
On March 27, a high school in the town of Sotteville-lès-Rouen, also in Normandy, had to evacuate its boarding facilities for part of the night, once again after threatening messages were received on ENT inboxes. The day before, a high school in the southern town of Castelnaudary was locked down for most of the afternoon following an intruder alert. According to the prosecutor's office in the nearby city of Carcassonne, this time the tip-off was a call received by a police station in the northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Yet again, the claim proved to be completely false.
France's national security alert level has been at its highest since March 22, when the Islamic State group (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack on Crocus City Hall near Moscow. However, the proliferation of false alarms at French schools has been going on for several months, particularly in the Paris region. The Paris prosecutor's office said on Thursday that it had opened three investigations, which were assigned to the judicial police's cybercrime squad. One of these concerns threats that affected high schools in the Paris region on March 26 and 27, while another concerns a series of threats that occurred on the night of March 20. The third investigation will "centralize investigations opened" by several prosecutors' offices following false alarms disseminated on ENT systems.
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