Interior Minister, Davor Bozinovic, said on Monday that police were cooperating intensively with the Security Intelligence Agency (SOA), Europol, Interpol and shopping malls regarding the recently frequent bomb alerts which have all proven to be false alarms.

“All our institutions are working intensively on the reports. The police are conducting a criminal investigation in partnership with the SOA, and several meetings have been held with shopping center representatives and the Croatian chamber of commerce,” Bozinovic said, adding that he could not reveal any more details because a criminal investigation is underway.

Bozinovic pointed out that there are models that must be applied jointly in order to avoid causing panic, which, he added, is the main goal of irresponsible people who are sending bomb hoaxes.

“That has been handled successfully until now. We are cooperating intensively with our partners from Europol and Interpol, given that the domains from which these messages are being sent are from some other countries that have recently sent messages and fake news in various ways aimed at creating unease among Croatians, for example, fake news about the number of Croatians killed in Ukraine,” he said, without clarifying.

Bozinovic said that he had also discussed the false reports on Monday with representatives of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, with whom he met ahead of a conference entitled “12th ISABS Conference on Forensic and Anthropological Genetics and Mayo Clinical Lectures in Individualised Medicine,” which is being held in Dubrovnik from 22 to 27 June.

I hope they will help us with their advice on how to detect the perpetrators and find a solution to situations that cause unease among the people, he said.

Recently there have been several false reports about explosive devices in shopping malls. On Sunday alone, the police evacuated visitors and employees from three shopping malls – two in Novi Zagreb and one in a mall in Zagreb’s western suburbs, before it was established that bomb threats were a hoax.