Nearly 1 million people in Russia evacuated due to wave of 'telephone terrorism'

Russian media reported on October 9 that the month-long wave of "telephone terrorism" in Russia has affected nearly 1 million people in more than 140 cities in the country.

Security personnel stand guard at a store in Moscow after evacuating residents and employees after receiving a bomb threat. Source: AFP/VNA

According to Russian news agency RIA Novosti, citing Russian emergency agencies, since September 11, 2,340 establishments including public places or administrative, social and business headquarters in 144 cities of the country have received many anonymous bomb threats, forcing more than 960,000 people to evacuate.

According to other sources, on October 9, tens of thousands of people were also evacuated from government buildings, schools, bus or train stations, hotels and shopping streets in many different cities of Russia including the capital Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Earlier, on October 6, TASS news agency reported that more than 250 different buildings in Moscow also received anonymous bomb threats. So far, all of the above calls have been verified as "hoax" actions.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said the damage caused by the wave of "telephone terrorism" amounted to more than 300 million rubles ($5.2 million).

A private source of the RBK news agency (Russia) previously said that the FSB is considering the hypothesis that an international hacker group is behind the anonymous calls mentioned above. The FSB believes that this group wrote a separate program to create a stream of calls using IP phones to addresses that are public locations.

At the same time, the FSB also determined that some of the calls were made from Brussels (Belgium). Last week, the FSB said that many of the bomb threat calls were made by four Russian citizens living abroad in coordination with accomplices in the country. Previously, there was information that the self-proclaimed "Islamic State" (IS) organization or individuals from Ukraine could have made the "terrorist" calls.

According to Vietnamplus