Patna, Jaipur airports receive hoax bomb threats; security beefed up

Authorities at the Patna and Jaipur airport received hoax bomb threats on Tuesday.

In the first incident, Patna airport received a bomb threat by email, following which a thorough search of the facility was conducted and security beefed up, officials said. However, the mail turned out to be a hoax, they said.
 

“A bomb threat through email was received at the Jayaprakash Narayan International Airport, besides 41 other airports. The Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) Meeting was convened… and it found the threat to be non-specific,” Patna Airport Director Anchal Prakash said.
 

Further follow-up actions are in process, he said. “The email, which was received around 1.10 pm, contained a bomb threat. Security has been bolstered at the airport in the wake of the development,” a senior police officer said. “We are trying to trace the source of the email and the sender,” he added. 

In a similar incident in Jaipur, security agencies on Tuesday jointly conducted a thorough investigation at the airport after it received a bomb threat. Police and CISF searched the premises after the airport management received a bomb threat via email.

"The airport was thoroughly checked but nothing suspicious has been found so far," the police said. The airport authorities received similar threats in April. Earlier in the day, a private college also got a bomb blast threat which turned out to be a hoax.

41 airports across India get hoax bomb threat on email

Forty-one airports in the country received bomb threat emails on Tuesday and each of them was declared a hoax following anti-sabotage checks by security agencies that lasted for hours, official sources said.

The emails were received at the airports around 12.40 pm from the email id exhumedyou888@gmail.com. The airports scrambled contingency measures, carried out anti-sabotage checks and swept the terminals following the respective Bomb Threat Assessment Committee recommendations, the sources told PTI.

An online group called "KNR" is suspected to be behind these hoax threat emails. The group reportedly issued similar emails to several schools in the Delhi-NCR on May 1, they said.

The emails received by the airports carried almost the identical message: "Hello, there are explosives hidden in the Airport. The bombs will soon explode. You will all die."

All the airports reported the threat to be a hoax and passenger movements were kept unhindered to the best of the capacities, the sources said.

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