The Belgian police are investigating various bomb warnings that have forced around thirty schools in Brussels and in the province of Walloon Brabant to be closed this Monday, reported the body responsible for education in Wallonia-Brussels. Nearly 10,000 primary and secondary education students have been affected by these closures.
The management of the various centers received an email on the night of Sunday to Monday that threatened to detonate explosives in five of these establishments if they did not pay a sum of ten million euros, reports the French-speaking newspaper Le Soir.
The general administrator of the educational organizing power, Julien Nicaise, said that the emails also made reference to jihad. Cécile Marquette, head of communication for the official education network of Wallonia-Brussels, stated for her part in statements to the same newspaper that the schools first informed the police of the mail received and then the educational organizing authority.
Based on the information they have, they have decided to “strictly respect the precautionary principle” and not open educational centers.
According to the first information communicated to the school management, the police did not find any explosives this Monday in the schools, so it would be a false alarm. It is believed that schools could open on Tuesday, but at the moment there is no official communication.
In recent weeks, alerts of false attacks in schools in the Wallonia-Brussels federation have increased. This has particularly been the case in the towns of Dinant and Charleroi (southern of the country), in the free confessional schools.
Following these new bomb warnings, the Belgian Minister of Education, the socialist Caroline Désir, has announced that she will be a civil party in this case. “These actions undermine the functioning of our schools and create a climate that provokes anxiety,” lamented sources from the minister’s cabinet, Le Soir says. “It is essential to do everything possible to find the guilty and ensure their punishment,” she added.
Désir’s cabinet recalled that on November 10 it already discussed with the Belgian ministers of the Interior and Justice the possibility of establishing a centralized investigation given the “wave of bomb threats” in schools in the Wallonia-Brussels federation between the end of October and early November.
“Today the situation has been communicated to you to once again draw your attention to these actions that undermine the functioning of our schools and create a climate of anxiety,” the minister reported.
