Flowers in hand, often moved, dozens of students, parents and teachers came to pay their last respects to Dominique Bernard. On this morning of Monday, October 16, they are crowding in front of the Gambetta school complex in Arras, where this 57-year-old literature teacher was killed three days earlier by a radicalized former student. But around 10:30 a.m., the atmosphere suddenly changed: a bomb threat had just been triggered, following an “anonymous message received on the site Mycommissariat.fr“, tells L’Express the prefecture of Pas-de-Calais. The prefect of the department Jacques Billant, present on the scene, does not want to take any risks: the entire building is evacuated peacefully. Deminers are quickly dispatched to the site , and the doubts were lifted a few hours later. “It was a false alarm”, underlines the prefecture, without giving further details. The event, which only reinforced the students’ anxiety, is far from isolated.
The same day, Education Minister Gabriel Attal indicated that French schools have been the target of 168 bomb threats since the start of the school year at the beginning of September. The Ministry of Education specifies that these alerts are “sent directly to establishments or law enforcement”, by email or phone calls. For each alert, a procedure is systematically initiated, including the filing of a complaint and a report to the public prosecutor, the prefecture services and Internet service providers – responsible for assessing the threat -, and to the academic alert chain, as well as the retention of any message or other element that may support the complaint. “With very rare exceptions, all of these alerts required evacuation to verify the security in these establishments,” specifies the ministry, which recalls that their perpetrators can be sentenced “up to two years of imprisonment and 30,000 euros in fines.” ‘fine”. “It is unacceptable and intolerable. These are threats which aim to intimidate, to scare,” insisted Gabriel Attal on Monday, indicating that a certain number of perpetrators had already been identified. The minister notably mentioned a case in Essonne for which “two minors were arrested”, or even a conviction of a young adult in the Hautes-Pyrénées, for “false bomb threat sent to a school”.
These false threats do not only target schools, colleges and high schools: last Saturday, the Louvre museum was evacuated after being “the recipient of an anonymous bomb threat message, without demands”, indicates the establishment, which specifies that it was a “false alarm”. The same goes for the Château de Versailles and its entire estate, evacuated on Saturday as well as this Tuesday at the start of the afternoon “for security reasons following a police decision”.
According to the Paris police headquarters, these offenses have even increased by 25% over the first nine months of 2023 compared to the same period last year – note that the figures also cover interventions on parcels or suspicious envelopes, for example. The phenomenon particularly affects Val-de-Marne, where this increase reaches 60%. Since the start of the school year in September 2023, more than 25 schools in the department have been targeted “by more than fifteen false bomb alerts”, underlines the Créteil public prosecutor’s office, which regrets in a press release that “exceptional police resources had to be mobilized, to the detriment of other judicial investigations or operations on public roads.
“Very futile” motivations
At the national level, the Ministry of Justice recalls that there is no data concerning the strict scope of “bomb threats”. Only the figures for convictions for “threats of destruction” and “false alarms and/or false reports” – which also include false reports for theft, fires or violence, for example – were sent to L’Express by the Chancellery. No fewer than 722 convictions were handed down in 2022 for this type of offense, compared to 646 in 2019, an increase of almost 12% in three years. More than half of the perpetrators (52%) were sentenced to fines, but 28% also received fixed or suspended prison sentences. As a general rule, the criminal response rate, that is to say the number of cases following which there was a criminal conviction, amounts to more than 96% for the authors of “false alarms and/or of false denunciations”, and more than 92% for “threats of destruction”.
According to ministry data, the profile of those convicted is also very specific. In 2022, 81% of them were men, the majority (57%) of whom were aged 18 to 34, and 37% over 34. Finally, 5% of people convicted for this type of offense – including bomb threats – were minors. This is how on October 13, a 15-year-old young man was presented to the Créteil public prosecutor’s office for a guilty hearing before the children’s judge, which will be held at the end of November. A former student at the Paul-Bert high school in Maisons-Alfort (Val-de-Marne), he had, two days earlier, issued a false bomb threat in the establishment, before admitting the facts during his arrest. Two other minors, aged 15 and 16, were also brought before the Créteil public prosecutor’s office on October 9, for other false bomb threats dating from October 5. Finally, four minors aged 13 and 14 were placed in police custody this Monday for false bomb threats that targeted the Henri Rol-Tanguy college in Champigny-sur-Marne on October 12. The Créteil public prosecutor’s office emphasizes to L’Express that the identified minors have “no real academic difficulties”, and that their motivations, such as the cancellation of classes due to the evacuation, are “very futile”. “They are part of a group movement, a false bomb threat calling for a new bomb threat,” it is specified.
Same type of profile in Grenoble, where a 12-year-old minor “computer enthusiast”, according to prosecutor Eric Vaillant, was arrested on October 4 after sending a bomb threat message to La Salle college, located in the city center. “It’s not because they are young that it’s necessarily a joke. This young boy was angry at the school for stupid things, even if he later tried to cancel the sending of his email, without it achieve, then recognized and regretted the facts”, underlines Eric Vaillant. The prosecutor fears “a fashion effect”: the day after this event, eight establishments in Grenoble received a bomb alert email whose text, identical, was “of an Islamist nature”. Departmental security police officers were contacted, and the investigation is still ongoing. “It can be difficult to find the perpetrators: it all depends on the precautions that have been taken, for example to hide email addresses,” breathes the prosecutor.
Questioned about the profile of these authors of false bomb threats, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirms for its part “that it is not uncommon for the authors to be minors”, even “if this is not always the case” . For “at least a year”, “a large number of false bomb alerts” have been triggered, by minors or adults, “in airports, educational establishments and cultural places”. To find the authors of these messages, “particularly technical” investigations in order to identify the channel through which the threats circulated are carried out by the specialized teams of the prosecution’s anti-cybercrime section, then a second phase of verification involving on the material and the interviews of the suspect are carried out. On October 12, an individual was referred to the Paris public prosecutor’s office for immediate appearance upon prior admission of guilt for “repeated death threats of an anti-Semitic nature and disclosure of false information in order to make people believe in dangerous destruction.” Three days earlier, he had called for emergency police assistance, believing “that two synagogues had to burn” and suggesting that he had just set fire to the buildings.