Employees of Yandex evacuated after Putin’s visit
The offices of the company Yandex, which President Vladimir Putin visited on Thursday, were evacuated soon after his departure, the BBC Russian service reports.
Some of the staff say that a fire alarm went off, whereas others say that Yandex was due to a bomb threat.
According to TASS news agency, nearly 3000 people were evacuated from the company’s offices.
The Russian president came to Yandex in order to congratulate the company on its 20th anniversary, as well as to see its engineering – the voice assistant “Alice”, and the self-driving car based on the Toyota Prius.
The employees reported that extremely strict security measures were taken before the president’s visit – the Federal protective service implemented an ID control point to enter the building.
As reported by Meduza news website with reference to a Yandex employee, during Putin’s visit, some of the staff were prohibited from leaving their places to go to the toilet. Other staff members say that they were able to move freely about the building.
One Yandex employee, who had threatened on social networks to “spit on Putin” if he met him, was not allowed to come to work on Thursday.
Yandex Public Relations Director Ochir Mandzhikov gave Gazeta.ru details about the evacuation.
“During the last two days we had been strenuously examined by the security service. It would have been impossible to place bombs here, they created a virtually sterile zone. However, today, two and a half hours after Putin’s visit, we received an anonymous phone call, after which the employees were evacuated,” he said.
In Moscow, six museums and an arboretum were evacuated due to anonymous phone calls with bomb threats on Thursday. The Moscow offices of the Kalashnikov concern, which are close to Yandex, were also evacuated on Thursday.
Since last week, there have been large-scale evacuations in the major Russian cities on account of bomb threats. None of the bomb threats throughout Russia have been substantiated.