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Bomb threat emails target 3 DMK ministers, police say 343 hoax emails in 7 months in Chennai
A bomb threat email targeting DMK ministers in Tamil Nadu was found to be a hoax, part of a trend of similar threats in recent months.
A police investigation was launched on Wednesday after bomb threat emails were sent to Tamil Nadu’s director general of police’s (DGP) office, claiming to target the residence of three DMK ministers in Chennai and Trichy district, people familiar with the matter said, adding that they were later found to be hoax.
The bomb scare email was sent to the police warning of threats in state minister of Hindu religious and charitable endowments Sekar Babu’s Chennai residence and the homes of minister of education Anbil Mahesh and minister of municipal administration KN Nehru in Trichy districts. Police teams along with bomb disposal and detection squads and sniffer dogs conducted searches and found them to be a hoax.
According to police, this has been a recurring pattern in Tamil Nadu. The previous such incident happened on October 31 when a bomb threat at the enforcement directorate’s (ED) office in Chennai was found to be a hoax.
Similar threat emails have been sent to political leaders, schools, celebrities, consular offices and institutions across the state in the past few months. A month ago, in the first week of October, a series of emails claimed that bombs had been planted in the residences of chief minister MK Stalin, governor RN Ravi, headquarters of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Tamil Nadu unit and Tamil actor Trisha which were all found to be a hoax after searches.
Greater Chennai police commissioner A Arun said the city has received a total of 342 such emails in the last seven months. “But no threat is taken lightly,” he said. “Either a community service register (CSR) or a first information report (FIR) have been filed in each of the cases…The anti terror squad (ATS) unit is investigating these cases.”
According to the initial investigation, similar language patterns have been observed in all such emails and the senders are suspected to be locals who have been using VPNs (virtual private networks) and dark web browsers to conceals the IP address, the city commissioner said, adding that recently the senders used Gmail and Hotmail accounts using VPN.
