Eight teenagers were arrested over dozens of fake bomb threats to schools in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo that have virtually paralysed teaching, police said on Tuesday.
Since October 14, eight teenagers have been arrested over fake bomb threats including three on Monday evening, a police spokeswoman told AFP.
On Tuesday morning several Sarajevo high schools received new bomb threats, spokeswoman Mersiha Novalic said.
As on all the previous occasions, students were evacuated and the police inspected the schools, she added.
The threats, sent mainly by email and sometimes by telephone, have been occurring on an almost daily basis since the start of the month.
Almost all of Sarajevo’s 35 high schools and several primaries have been targeted.
“Since the beginning of October, we haven’t had any classes for about 10 days… or we’ve been evacuated in the middle of class,” Ena, a final-year student at a Sarajevo high school, told AFP.
Around a hundred bomb threats have been reported to the police in three weeks, according to an AFP count.
The first suspect to be arrested was a 16-year-old student who has made 49 fake bomb threats in 11 days, according to the prosecutors.
Seven of the eight arrested are minors and one is 18 years old.
So far, five of them have been placed in a specialised educational centre for minor delinquents, according to Novalic.
If found guilty of “threatening security” and raising a false alarm, the teenagers aged between 16 and 18 can be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison, according to Bosnian law.
Police warned such a large number of fake threats affects their work.
“We have to follow the protocol for such situations, organise evacuations and carry out searches to check if there’s a device.
“Every email, no matter how trivial, needs to be investigated,” inspector Sasa Petrovic told regional broadcaster TVSA.
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