Bomb threats targeting 292 schools across Hungary caused widespread evacuations and the cancellation of classes on Thursday, January 23rd. Police conducted thorough searches of the affected institutions, but no explosive devices were found, allowing pupils to return to school on Friday.
Following the bomb scares, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said that his country would not only be facing threats but also acts of terrorism if they had admitted migrants to Hungary.
Speaking to Kossuth Rádió on Friday, Viktor Orbán said it was possible that the threats were orchestrated from an international hub, one beyond the reach of Hungarian authorities. He pointed to similar bomb threats against Slovakian and Czech schools last year. On Wednesday, numerous schools in Bulgaria also received bomb threats.
He noted that acts of terrorism occur regularly in Western Europe, therefore it is impossible to dismiss such events with a mere shrug of the shoulder. He stressed that “if we had allowed migrants in, we would not be facing threats, but acts of terrorism.”
The conservative leadership of Hungary has been one of the few governments in Europe that has warned of the consequences of illegal migration since the beginning of the migration crisis in 2015. Hungarian officials have regularly stressed that the terrorist acts committed in recent years on Western European soil are strongly linked to migration from North Africa and the Middle East.
Despite successfully keeping out illegal migrants, Hungary was brutally punished and fined by the European Court of Justice last year for allegedly “abusing asylum seekers’ rights.”
Hungarian authorities have established that the bomb threats, which came in the form of emails, were identical in their text and likely sent by a single sender. The emails were sent from numerous email providers, including foreign ones.
The text claimed to be directed at Hungary as punishment for “interfering in the Muslim world’s affairs.” The letter includes warnings such as:
We have witnessed your government’s ongoing war against Muslims, and it would be just for you to now experience the wrath of the oppressed. From now on, your safety is no longer guaranteed.
According to linguists who spoke to Hungarian media outlets, the Hungarian text seems like it had been translated from English, which in turn may have been translated from Arabic, possibly using AI technology. According to Mandiner, the messages may have been sent from Ukrainian IP addresses via the Russian email provider Yandex.
Hungary has a rocky relationship with Ukraine, as the Budapest government is one of a few in the EU that has consistently refused to send military aid to Kyiv in its war with Russia. Hungary also takes issue with the fact that Ukraine has been limiting the rights of Hungarian ethnic minorities for many years.
