MOSCOW, September 21. /TASS/. Telephone calls warning of bombs at four museums and the legendary Mosfilm movie studio have led to the evacuation of nearly 3,000 people in Moscow, a law enforcement source said on Thursday.
Two anonymous bomb threat calls were made to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Borodino Battle Museum Panorama. Authorities have also evacuated the State Darwin Museum and the Moscow Transport Museum after similar bomb threats.
Police and canine crews are working at the scene.
Earlier on Thursday, emergencies services received calls warning that bombs had been planted in more than 10 facilities, including a residential building on Kutuzovsky Avenue in western Moscow.
The anonymous phone call did not hamper the work of Mosfilm, the largest and oldest film studio in Russia and in Europe, its director general and film director Karen Shakhnazarov told TASS.
The warning was issued not for the whole studio, but for one of its buildings, he explained. "This posed no danger to people, there was no one inside at the moment." All excursions at Mosfilm will be held as scheduled on Thursday, the press service of the studio said.
A wave of bomb calls in Russian cities began on September 11. The peak of such calls was reported on September 13 when anonymous callers warned of possible explosions at 100 facilities, mostly schools, railway terminals, airports and trade centers, in Moscow only.
According to TASS sources, police believe it was a planned action organized by a group of persons. The mass media offered various theories, from the so-called Ukrainian trace (like in 2014, when false bomb calls came from Ukrainian telephone numbers) to a theory that the Islamic State terrorist group is behind these bomb threats.