‘Jejemon’ bomb hoax leads to Ateneo lockdown

A BOMB threat sent through “jejemon-style” text messages led to the suspension of classes on the Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU) campus on Katipunan Avenue in Loyola Heights, Quezon City, on Monday morning.

College students were scheduled to take their exams that day. Only they and grade school students were holding classes on the AdMU campus when an employee received the bomb threat.

“It’s difficult to determine what the motives are, but you already know [this happens] whenever there are exams,” said Senior Insp. Noel Sublay, chief of  Explosives and Ordnance Division (EOD) of the Quezon City Police District (QCPD).

University officials promptly ordered a school-wide evacuation and the suspension of all classes by 10 a.m., resulting in hours of heavy traffic on the northbound lane of Katipunan.

A search of the 84 buildings on the 60-hectare campus kept the QCPD-EOD team

—backed up by bomb disposal teams from the National Capital Region Police Office, Philippine National Police and even the Philippine Army—busy until late afternoon.

At 2:55 p.m., the school was declared safe and officials allowed the faculty, staff and students to retrieve any belongings they had left behind in any building, Sublay said.

 ‘Duguan s2dyante nyu’

By 5 p.m., the campus-wide search had yet to turn up anything suspicious, prompting Sublay to declare the bomb threat a hoax.

According to him, the threat came in the form of SMS messages written in jejemon-style. They were sent at 8:30 a.m. to an employee of the AdMU Loyola Schools Office for Social Concern and Involvement.

The first message read, “Pagdating ng 9:00 malaking pasabog t2ma. Dguan mga  s2dyante nyu (At 9 a.m., there will be a huge explosion. Your students will be left bloodied.)”

The next read: “H2yaan nyu b bhay ng s2dyante nyu (Will you risk your students’ lives?)”

“It was ‘jejemon’ text,” a tired Sublay told the Inquirer in an interview, referring to a local youth lingo that shortens words or spells them with numerals and symbols, sometimes alternating upper and lower-case letters. From this, he surmised the sender may have been young.

Like Miriam

The text messages warning of bloodshed called to mind the bomb threats sent to Miriam College, AdMU’s neighbor on Katipunan Avenue, in October 2014. The text messages back then went: “Uulan ng dugo… sa Miriam College (Blood will rain on Miriam College)” and “Dadanak ang dugo sa Katipunan (Blood will flow on Katipunan).”

The last time a bomb scare was reported on the AdMU campus was in February 2014, when three offices received consecutive threats also sent through SMS.

Sublay admitted that tracking the bomb threat sender could prove to be a futile affair, as past SMS scares usually made use of prepaid numbers which are unregistered.  “This is why I hope the SIM registration act could be passed,” he said.

But Sublay pointed out: “It’s really the students who are put at a disadvantage here. They end up being shortchanged.”

On its official Facebook page, the AdMU administration said  classes and work would resume on the Quezon City campus today (Tuesday).