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Police officers evacuating a school in Bayreuth after a bomb threat.
Photo: Pia Bayer / dpa
A large number of anonymous bomb threats, which have been received in recent days by schools, media companies and diplomatic missions in Germany, among others, are apparently due to free-riding from the milieu of cybercrime. This was the result of joint research by SPIEGEL and the ARD political magazine »Contrasts«.
The trail of the authors leads to a group of men who have already attracted attention in the past through criminal activities on the Internet. Among other things, they are said to have deliberately made false emergency calls in order to trigger police or fire brigade operations. The provocation of such operations by internet trolls is also known as "swatting".
According to the research, numerous threatening e-mails had identical or similar text modules, which indicate that the authors acted in an organized manner. The alleged freeloaders pretended to be either Islamist Hamas fighters or militant Israelis and threatened to carry out bomb attacks.
The texts were written in English as well as in Arabic and Hebrew. In addition to violent fantasies, they contained insults against the other side. Apparently, the anonymous perpetrators wanted to spread fear and incite individual population groups against each other.
"Hello, your building is being bombed"
According to investigators, identical or similar threatening letters were received by the SPD, the Algerian embassy and the Palestinian mission in Berlin, among others. In all cases, the Berlin police evaluated the e-mails as an act of free-riding and initiated investigations for disturbing the public peace by threatening to commit criminal acts.
In the e-mails to the Palestinian diplomatic mission, the senders claimed to be "a radical group of Israelis" with explosives and automatic rifles. Hello, we are pleased to inform you that we are going to bomb your building," reads the text, which is written in English and Hebrew.
In an almost identical e-mail to a hospital in Frankfurt am Main, the authors claim to be Islamist terrorists. "Hello, we are pleased to inform you that your building is being bombed in the name of Hamas," reads the text, written in English and Arabic.