BERLIN, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- Bomb threats prompted the evacuation of several schools across Germany on Friday. The alerts followed similar threats made throughout the week in different parts of the country.
"The schools were searched for suspicious objects, but none were found," the Aalen police, in southern Germany, said in a statement.
"The threats are almost certainly part of a (planned) series," the authorities said. The police forces are conducting a large-scale criminal investigation to find the perpetrators.
Also on Friday, the city hall in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, had to be closed off due to a bomb alert. A police spokesperson told the local media that the threat had been received by email, without giving further details about a possible motive.
Schools had been a main target of bomb threats in the past days but Berlin's main train station and a radio station in the city of Weimar were also targeted. It appears that the threats were mostly sent by email, but a lot of details are still unclear.
The German government's commissioner for combating anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, has condemned the nationwide bomb threats, calling it a "despicable attempt at intimidation" in his interview with Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland on Wednesday.
