Wellington:
At least a dozen schools across New Zealand received bomb threats on Thursday, causing widespread disruption in what is believed to have been a foreign cyberattack.
Many of the schools involved were closed or evacuated as a result.
The new wave of threats came 24 hours after hoax calls to four New Zealand schools on Wednesday in Waikato, Thames and Gisborne in the North Island.
Cherie Taylor-Patel, president of the New Zealand Principal’s Federation, told RNZ she had spoken with the Ministry of Education, who “understood that this was actually a cyberbot coming from abroad”.
New Zealand police said in a statement they “do not believe there is a security risk”.
But authorities said they were still investigating threats to schools in Marlborough, Masterton, Kaikoura, Greymouth, Queenstown, Levin, Whanganui, Rolleston, Takaka, Geraldine, Dunstan, Ashburton and Palmerston North.
The Tasman area commander Simon Feltham said they were talking to “two young people” about a threat against Marlborough Girls’ College.
So far, there have been no reports of explosives found at any of the targeted schools.
There was a similar incident in 2016 when schools in New Zealand and Australia received hoax calls that there were live bombs on the property.
In 2018, an Israeli-American was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a court in Israel for making about 2,000 hoax threats in North America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Denmark.
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