Rash of bomb threats learning opportunity, says federal minister

Authorities around world studying response to Thursday’s wave of threats, which turned out to be hoax

TORONTO — Law enforcement officials in Canada and beyond will be working to learn lessons about how to best respond to bomb threats after a rash of such incidents this week, the federal public safety minister said Friday.

Ralph Goodale said policing and security experts around the world will be scrutinizing the fallout from the wave of threats, which triggered varying responses from forces in Canada and the United States on Thursday.

The idle threats, delivered via email, touched off everything from quiet divisionallevel investigations to full-scale evacuations of public buildings and deployments of specialized explosives investigators.

Three auto dealerships in Penticton were evacuated after receiving the emailed threats Thursday morning.

Police in the Central Okanagan said two businesses in Kelowna and one in Peachland also received the threats.

Police forces said probes into bomb threats are particularly time-consuming and resource-intensive, and Goodale said experts around the world would be looking for ways to limit the toll on those on the front lines.

“The level of international collaboration here is very high — police, security, intelligence across three continents making sure that we examine an incident like this and learn every conceivable lesson from that experience, including response capacity,” Goodale said at an appearance in Toronto. “We will go to school on all of that.”

Thursday’s wave of bomb threats, which American investigators declared a hoax, swept across communities on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.

Police departments in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa and Winnipeg, as well as Ontario’s provincial force and RCMP detachments in B.C. and Manitoba, investigated multiple threats that all proved groundless.

One busy subway station in downtown Toronto was briefly evacuated as part of the investigation from city police, who said they received at least 10 false calls throughout the day.

In the U.S., hundreds of schools, businesses and government buildings received emails that triggered searches, evacuations and fear. Investigators, however, dismissed the threats as a crude extortion attempt intended to cause disruption and compel recipients into sending money.

Some of the emails had the subject line “Think Twice.” They were sent from a spoofed email address. The sender claimed to have had an associate plant a small bomb in the recipient’s building and that the only way to stop him from setting it off was by making an online payment of $20,000 in Bitcoin currency.

Goodale said experts on three continents have already begun analyzing Thursday’s threats for potential lessons.