Bratislava:

Slovak schools and institutions including banks received over 1,100 bomb threats on Tuesday, prompting evacuations across the country, the police said, announcing they had launched a terror probe.

“The act is being investigated as a particularly serious crime of terrorist attack,” said Rastislav Polakovic, the deputy chief of police.

“Emails started arriving at schools on Tuesday from five or six in the morning,” Polakovic said, adding that almost 1,000 of the bomb threats were directed at schools and more than 100 of them were received by banks.

“The police are working at full speed, checking security at schools and working to identify the perpetrator,” the police wrote on their official Facebook page.

Perpetrators face possible life imprisonment.

Lucia Forman, the spokeswoman for the Bratislava self-governing region, told AFP that the country had registered bomb threats in dozens of schools it runs.

“We took all the necessary steps, the children were evacuated and the police are dealing with the case,” she said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)