MOSCOW. Feb 26 (Interfax) - The Moscow police received around 40 reports via different channels about possible bombs at different facilities in the city on Monday, a source familiar with the situation told Interfax on Tuesday.
"More than 130 facilities were checked and over 8,000 people were evacuated in the wake of these anonymous threats," the source said.
On Monday, police received reports about bombs at some 70 branches of a major Russian bank, the Moscow City Court, several district courts, all of the city's thermal power plants, five shopping malls, an office of a Moscow energy company, and several post offices, he said.
"All of these threats turned out to be a hoax," the source said.
Moscow has been hit by mass bomb scares in the past month. Emergency services received more than 500 anonymous bomb threats on February 5 alone. Some 700 facilities were checked and 165,000 people were evacuated in the city within a 24-hour period.
Moscow police chief Oleg Baranov said in the Moscow City Court on February 20 that 170 criminal cases had been opened into hoax bomb threats in 2018.
Such reports arrive from abroad, Baranov said, without naming any particular countries.