Officials claimed hundreds of schools in Hungary received bomb threats on Thursday, requiring them to temporarily remove children.
According to interior ministry spokesman Bence Retvari, 268 educational institutions around the country received bomb threats via email, the majority of which were in the capital Budapest.
Authorities have discovered “no direct risk of a bomb attack,” he added.
Police are in contact with their counterparts in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, where schools have faced similar “Islamist” threats in the past, he said.
Gergely Gulyas, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, said it was too early to speculate on the motivation, citing continuing investigations.
Police have also called Europol, the EU’s police agency, in their investigation into “endangering public safety”.
Police conducted inspections of schools that had received threats before allowing evacuated pupils and staff to return, affecting tens of thousands of kids.
In May of last year, almost 1,000 bomb threats were made against Slovak schools and institutions.
In early September 2024, hundreds of Czech and Slovak schools received bomb threats, with Czech officials citing “Russian influence” as one of the possible causes.