Unless they receive one million euros worth of Bitcoins, blackmailers are threatening to spread Ebola in the Czech Republic, local police sources cited by The Straits Times have revealed on Monday. In an email received by the country’s top TV station TV Nova, a blackmailer – or a group of blackmailers – have claimed to have “biological material” from a Liberian person infected with Ebola, and threatened to spread it unless the claims of 1 million euros in Bitcoins (currently around 3,550 BTC) were fulfilled.
According to the Czech Republic’s police chief, Zdenek Ladube, the goal of the blackmailer was to spread panic from the very beginning. The local authorities have called on the population to calm down – obtaining, transporting and spreading the virus in any way other than direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person is very hard. If caught, the blackmailer faces twelve years in prison.
In the meantime the official death toll of the West African Ebola epidemic has risen over 4,800, and the number of confirmed cases has exceeded 9,900, according to the data revealed by the World Health Organization. These numbers, however official they might be, are mostly speculative – there is no way to find out exact statistics about the spread of the disease in the West African countries – Nigeria, Guinea and Sierra Leone – with a precarious health system. Earlier this month a WHO specialist has declared that the number of Ebola cases might be severely underestimated, and the number of new cases of the disease appearing each week might reach 10,000 until this December.
Since the beginning of the outbreak, Ebola has spread to the US due to the insufficient screening methods at the US and European airports, and a Spanish nurse was also infected, supposedly due to the inadequate protection methods implemented at the hospital where she worked.