Several schools in Medicine Hat initiated lock down procedures on Monday morning after a series of anonymous threats were sent to a number of students.

Late Sunday evening, police were notified that a group of five students were sent threatening text messages from an anonymous sender.

The messages indicated harm towards the recipients, four of whom attend schools in the community.

Police say they are working to identify the sender of the threatening messages and are looking to see if the text messages are linked to a similar threat in the U.S. in 2013.

All school boards in the Medicine Hat area were notified about the incident and one school, McCoy High School, voluntarily shut down for the day in the interest of public safety.

A number of other schools, including all the schools in Medicine Hat School District 76 and Eagle Butte High School, initiated lock down procedures.

Further information is available on the website's of the affected school divisions:

Medicine Hat police say it appears that the originating phone numbers used in the threats were 'ghosted' or 'spoofed' numbers, which can be found on the Internet.

During the investigation, it was revealed that other similar complaints of text threats were received by another police agency in the province and named specific young people.

“Right now we’ve got a number of our major crimes investigators trying to determine the source of the contact so at this point in time all we've got is a text message has been sent, we're trying to find out where that text message came from,” said MHPS S/Sgt. Brian Christmann.

Police believe that a single, common contact outside the province may be the originator and they have identified and are speaking with a person of interest.

Investigators say several others have come forward since the original complaint was released saying that they received threats of a similar nature in the past few weeks or months. Police are now looking into those threats as well.

“It legitimizes the seriousness that we have to take with this because there are particular names. Now it just so happens that three of the people named go to the same school. There was no threat towards the school of any sort it so happens that the kids go to one school. A fourth person we believe is from Florida. We’re still trying to determine if that person is a real person and has ties to Medicine Hat and a fifth person goes to Eagle Butte School,” said Christmann.

The Medicine Hat Police Service is reminding parents to talk to their children about not accepting requests from contacts who are not known to them.  

Anyone with information about the investigation is asked to contact the MHPS at 403-529-8420.