False bomb threat prompted evacuation of BNT staff

A false bomb threat caused the evacuation of BNT staff from the building of the public service broadcaster on August 21. The bomb scare was received on the BNT news e-mail. The same letter was sent to the airports in Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and Bourgas. A check by the Interior Ministry counter-terrorism unit found no explosive devices in the building.

The threat was received by e-mail shortly after 9:30 in the morning. Likely, the text in Bulgarian was written with the help of machine translation service as it states that the explosive devices were "planted" in the building of the television company "BNT".

BNT staff remained outside the building for three hours.

The investigation is on-going to identify the sender of the bomb threats.