“Hello, police? ! A bomb will explode this morning at 10:30 a.m. at Cours Louis XIV. » In the cult film by Claude Zidi The under-gifted, released in 1980, Daniel Auteuil plays the character of Bébel. This turbulent high school student, educated in a Versailles baccalaureate, found a ploy to get classes canceled: a threat of attack. A few moments after making the phone call, firefighters and CRS arrived at the establishment and evacuated students and teachers who gathered in the street, near the castle. The police commissioner, played by Michel Galabru, ends up understanding that it is “a false alarm given by a few schoolboys who wanted a day off”. “But as you never know, we’re going to search the house,” he tells his men, before lamenting “a wasted day.” »
With this false bomb threat, did Daniel Auteuil influence generations of high school and college students looking for an easy way to skip class? Thirty-three years later, the same subterfuge is in any case regularly used. According to information from 20 minutes, 147 threats of this type have been recorded in police zones since the start of 2023, including a third since the start of the school year. And according to a National Education count, there were 47 between September 4 and 20. “There are as many of them as usual, unfortunately. This was the case last year,” lamented last Thursday, on RMC, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. And all these threats are taken seriously by the authorities, “even if they are repetitive”.
“Oh my, the cops are coming back”
Several establishments were evacuated last Tuesday, throughout France, after receiving threats of attack. In Seine-Saint-Denis, the management of the Paul-Eluard high school was the recipient of a malicious email, signed by a pseudo-terrorist who – astonishingly – warns of having placed a bomb in the building and announces that he will come to “exterminate all the kuffars tomorrow with (his) Kalashnikov from Yemen brought back with (his) companions.” Around 8:15 a.m., the approximately 1,800 high school students were evacuated class by class and were grouped together on a sports field, while the students of a nearby primary school were confined. The central laboratory of the police headquarters and dog teams searched the establishment without any bomb being discovered. Students returned to class in the afternoon.
The same scene took place in middle and high schools in Seine-Maritime, in Hautes-Pyrénées, in Yvelines or in Val-de-Marne. Although the phenomenon is not new, some students are now filming the evacuations and posting their videos on social networks, giving these bomb threats significant resonance. “We’re still evacuated,” laughs a Norman high school student who posted the images on X, formerly Twitter. “Oh my, the cops are coming back,” comments another young person who posted the sequence on TikTok. But no one really seems stressed by the situation. “We don’t have class, yeees!” » even greets another Internet user in his message posted on the Chinese social network.
Precautionary principle
“There is an extremely strict protocol to respect,” explains 20 minutes Éric Henry, national delegate of the Alliance Police Nationale union. “Staff and students are evacuated, a security perimeter established, mine clearance moves. Once the doubt is resolved, everyone returns to the establishment, describes the police officer. But it takes a long time, sometimes several hours. It all depends on the importance of the alert, the configuration of the site, its size. These interventions require a deployment of human and material resources that are often quite significant. But we cannot exempt ourselves from this precautionary principle, especially with the terrorist risk and the recent threat from Al-Qaeda. »
And unlike Bébel, the perpetrators no longer just pick up their phone to alert the authorities. From the end of 2022, certain young people managed to hack student digital workspaces to broadcast bomb threats in different schools in France. “The alerts then came from internal software at the establishment, they were taken very seriously,” explained to Figaro Commissioner Christophe Durand, deputy head of the Central Office for Combating Crime Linked to Information and Communication Technologies (OCLCTIC).
“Kids” unknown to the police
This does not prevent the investigators responsible for the investigations from finding suspects, often in the days that follow. Last Wednesday, a young man, just an adult, was arrested by the PJ in Neuilly-sur-Marne and placed in police custody. He is suspected of being the author of the threat which had targeted the Paul-Éluard high school in Saint-Denis the day before. The same day, a 17-year-old minor was arrested as part of the investigation into threats of attacks against Norman schools. Further south, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, a 20-year-old student studying computer science at the Marie-Curie high school in Tarbes was arrested by the police after the establishment was evacuated on Tuesday.
“These are often kids who are not necessarily known to our services,” confides to 20 minutes a police source. Their motivation is not political. For these young people, little aware of the consequences, it is more of a game. Which is not without risk for them. Most of the suspects are being prosecuted for “death threats”, “false reporting” or “attacking an automated data processing system”. They face heavy penalties.