2023-11-27 21:19:00
Sunday evening, a wind of panic blew through around thirty schools in the Brussels Region and Walloon Brabant. Management received an email containing threats of explosion. All schools are part of the Wallonia-Brussels Education (WBE) network.
The message announces the presence of explosives in five of the establishments contacted. A ransom of ten million euros is demanded, in exchange for the exact location of the explosives. An account number is indicated.
A mayor confirms the terrorist connotation and the reference to jihad in this email.
Local police are alerted as well as their organizing authorities. The WBE network sets up a crisis unit and, as a precaution, decides that the targeted schools will be closed this Monday.
Bomb threats in schools: “There may be plenty of them during exams”
For management, it is then a race to inform parents and teachers, using various communication channels to support them. Around 10,000 students, from primary and secondary education, are affected. At the same time, local and federal police, aided by sniffer dogs, are carrying out searches. Research which will continue throughout the day…
The threat was lifted by mid-afternoon. The searches turned up nothing. Schools can open this Tuesday.
The investigation was entrusted to the federal judicial police in Brussels. The public prosecutor’s office centralizes all files in order to identify the perpetrator(s) of the acts, and to arrest them. The official network has become a civil party. The Minister of Education, Caroline Désir, did the same.
Other threats have affected several schools in recent weeks. We will remember in particular that just after the attack in Brussels in mid-October during which two Swedish supporters were killed, the schools of ‘t SJIBke and SJIB in Betekom in Flemish Brabant, and the Sainte-Marie Institute in La Louvière had been evacuated following a bomb threat. Neither did the investigations carried out turn out to be negative.
Bomb threat in 27 schools: what does the author of the threat risk… if we find him?
At the time, Olivier Luminet, professor of psychology at UCLouvain and FNRS (National Scientific Research Fund) research director, told us this:
“One of two things. Either they are unconscious pranksters, individuals who act alone, keen on jokes in very bad taste without any perspective. With, as a result, a risk of contamination. We learn that some people do this, we are going to do the same thing. Either these acts are the result of consultation with a strategic goal. People who have given themselves the word to prolong murderous terrorism with psychological terrorism. And, to this end, what could be more effective than putting a school on alert.”
At this stage, there has never been an act in Belgium, namely a real bomb planted in a school.
“The trouble in people’s minds is that it’s not certain that this will never be the case.”
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