explosives might have been planted in havard university

havard University in the US state of Massachusetts has evacuated its campus amid an “unconfirmed report” of explosives at four of its buildings, BBC reports. The university’s Twitter feed said there were no reports of an explosion and no indication that any bombs had been placed on campus. Harvard campus police and local police were on the scene. Final exams, which were under way at the elite college, have been cancelled in the affected buildings. Harvard said in a statement, “The Harvard University Police Department this morning received an unconfirmed report that explosives may have been placed in four buildings on campus: the Science Center, Thayer, Sever and Emerson Halls.” The campus was being cleared “out of an abundance of caution”, added Monday’s statement. “There’s a lot of helicopters about,” Anna Fifield, a Harvard fellow, told the BBC. She also said all gates into Harvard Yard had been closed following the threat, and “frustrated” students were requesting entrance to cordoned off areas. It is the latest security threat to a US school in recent months. In November, another Ivy League institution, Yale University in Connecticut, was locked down for nearly six hours following a report of an armed man, which was later found to be a hoax. In February, a gunman was reported on the campus of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That alarm, too, later proved false. Amid the ongoing threat of mass shootings at US schools, such alerts are an almost daily occurrence, though most turn out to be nothing. A BBC investigation found that, just in the month between 9 November and 9 December, US schools or college campuses were placed on “lockdown” on at least 130 occasions.