One of Bosnia's largest hospitals had to be evacuated on Thursday after a false bomb alert as the Balkan country has been targeted for a week by hundreds of such warnings targeting schools or public institutions.
Several hundred patients and staff at the university hospital center in Banja Luka, the capital of the Serbian entity in the country divided along ethnic lines, were evacuated after the establishment received an e-mail warning it of the presence of a bomb, hospital director Vlado Djajic told reporters.
After checking the scene, the police said in a press release that they had established that it was a false alarm.
"It's a despicable attack", reacted Vlado Djajic, specifying that the author of the message threatened to "explode the disbelievers", adding, according to him, "Allah is great".
Several courts in Sarajevo and the National Electoral Commission, which sits in the Bosnian capital, had to be evacuated on Thursday for the same reasons, according to the police.
The day before, more than 400 schools in Republika Srpska (RS), the Bosnian Serb entity, were victims of fake bomb threats sent by e-mail.
The identical message threatened to “blow up the school” to kill “thousands of Serbian children”.
Attacks described as “terrorism”
Bosnia has been divided since the intercommunal war of the 1990s between the RS and a Croat-Muslim federation.
The authorities have declared that they do not currently know the perpetrators and the motivations of these attacks, which the courts have qualified as "terrorism".
According to the Oslobodjenje daily, the e-mails sent to schools in the RS came from an address hosted by Yandex, a Russian-speaking internet giant, nicknamed the “Russian Google”.
The same messaging was used during a first series of alerts on May 25 against a hundred schools in the Sarajevo region, as well as public institutions and the cantonal government.
During a recent meeting with Bosnian President-in-Office Sefik Dzaferovic, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg insisted on the need for "strengthening of cooperation" between the Alliance and Bosnia in terms of online security.
Neighboring Serbia has also been the victim in recent weeks of false alarms which have disrupted the functioning of schools in particular.
Bosnia and Serbia have joined the ranks of countries that have denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the UN but have not aligned themselves with Western sanctions against Russia.
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