A 21-year-old college drop-out has been issued a subpoena over the hoax terrorist email threats sent to schools in Los Angeles, New York and Dallas.
Vincent Canfield, 21, will appear before New York prosecutors in connection with the messages which sparked fear on the East Coast and shut down every school in LA last week.
He claims he can locate the IP address that sent the emails, which were routed through Germany.
The Maine-born former student is currently based in Romania.
The emails sent shock waves through the nation, threatening to wreak havoc and massacre hundreds using bombs and rifles.
Canfield told CBS News on Friday that he received the subpoena this week, followed by a phone call from an NYPD detective.
He also received a summons from Las Vegas authorities.
Canfield posted a picture of the subpoena on Twitter on Tuesday – despite a clause dictating that he keep the existence of the subpoena secret.
He then posted recordings of his phone call with a New York detective.
The detective says: ‘The reason you got three days to respond is because of the severity of it.’
‘I do understand the severity of it,’ Canfield replies. ‘There’s some stuff I don’t understand on the subpoena and I’d like to understand it before I follow through.’
The subpoena orders Canfield to hand over all information in connection with his email address, which ‘used to send a threatening email to the superintendent of the NYC Public schools,’
According to Detective Michael Arena of the NYPD.
Speaking to CBS, Canfield said: ‘The account can’t be logged into.
It means that the user can’t send email (and) can’t delete anything. So the account is pretty much just frozen at this point in time.’
The 21-year-old, who has not been accused of terrorism, has been actively documenting his week on social media, and tweeted on Saturday: ‘A girl ditched me because of romanian press calling me a terror suspect :(‘
More than 640,000 children were ordered to stay home on the West Coast at 7am on Tuesday amid fears of an attack on the nation’s second largest school district.
FBI detectives and explosives experts descended on the 900 campuses in bullet-proof uniform after Los Angeles superintendent Ramon Cortines received an email describing plans to bomb at least three schools and attack students with assault rifles.
However, New Yorkers – who were already two hours into the school day – carried on as normal and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton held a press conference to describe the ‘basic errors’ that he believed showed the threat to be a hoax.
Describing the threat, he said: ‘In reviewing it, the instigator of the threat may be a Homeland fan’ he said. ‘Basically, watching Homeland episodes, it mirrors recent episodes on Homeland.’
One tell-tale sign was that the email spelled ‘Allah’ with a lowercase ‘a’.
‘[T]here was nothing credible about the threat,’ Bratton continued.
‘It was so generic, so outlandish and posed to numerous school districts simultaneously… the assumption of the NYPD and the assumption of the NYPD were exactly the same, that in fact it would be a huge disservice to our nation to close down our school system.’
