A string of detailed emails that claimed bombs had been planted at New Zealand schools and hospitals and which continued over many months may have come from overseas, police investigations have revealed.
Beginning in November 2023 and continuing into January 2024, emails described by police as “of a concerning nature” were received across the country. From the start, police said they believed they were from the same source, and tasked cybercrime officers with identifying the sender.
Though they wouldn’t identify the institutions that had been threatened, the public nature of school closures and evacuations meant the details filtered out.
The initial wave of emails targeted 15 institutions on Nov. 23, 2023.
First to react was St Kentigern’s College in Auckland, where parents received a text asking them to collect their children. The school’s website confirmed it was following emergency evacuation procedures.
Orewa College and at least two primary schools also closed, with one confirming it was due to a bomb threat.
Health New Zealand also confirmed that hospital sites had received threats, but were remaining open while security and medical staff were being particularly vigilant.
Police searched Wellington, Burwood (Christchurch), Auckland City, and Middlemore public hospitals and Bowen private hospital in Wellington.
3-Month Campaign
It is believed that a total of 70 threats were sent in November alone. This continued through December and into January, with police saying they were still investigating the origin and more schools were forced to close.When the emails stopped, interest in the investigation waned, and police stopped giving updates.
But in response to an Official Information Act (OIA) request, they have now revealed that over 200 threats were received over the three-month period, and that Operation Armidale was launched to investigate.
“The threats were made to a variety of different organisations including hospitals, courthouses, private businesses, hotels and a large number of primary and secondary schools throughout New Zealand,” they confirmed.
There were several commonalities between all the emails, which led to the conclusion that they were from the same source—the wording used to make the threat, the nature of the threat itself, and the method of delivery to the victim organisations.
The email addresses of the victims appeared to have been obtained from publicly available online sources.
Beyond that, however, police drew a blank.
Their OIA response says “Police was not able to identify the origin of the threats, or the identity of any individuals responsible for sending them,” partly because they had “utilised widely available obfuscation methods to hide their identities and locations.”
They dismissed a theory that the campaign was timed to disrupt New Zealand exams, because the endpoint of January 2024 was well beyond the conclusion of exam season, and continued through the Christmas break.
Offenders Lacked Local Knowledge
During this time, police noted, the North American school term continued. This implies the offenders were not local and had assumed that the southern hemisphere’s holidays mirrored those in the north.The variety of different organisations targeted and the broad nature of the threats also made it unlikely that exam disruption was the goal.
For instance, in 2022, a female student sent fake bomb threats to Otago University, warning of carnage greater than the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, to try and stop her parents from finding out she wasn’t graduating.
In the 2023/24 campaign, “The methodology used and phrasing of the threats by the offenders in this case aligns closely with publicly available information on online groups whose motivation is terrorism or nihilistic ideology,” police said.
In March this year, another batch of threatening emails was sent to two schools, sending one into lockdown, as well as to specific police stations, some news outlets and Parliament.
