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Note in flight lavatory sparks bomb scare at Bengaluru airport
The note was found in an Indigo flight carrying 175 passengers from Jaipur to Bengaluru on Sunday night before it could land at Kempegowda International Airport.
Security officials at Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru have been put on high alert after crew members found a note in a flight’s lavatory that a bomb had been planted in the aircraft.
The note was found in an Indigo flight carrying 175 passengers from Jaipur to Bengaluru on Sunday night before it could land at Kempegowda International Airport.
The crew members, who found the note, alerted the flight’s captain immediately, who contacted Air Traffic Control (ATC).
The note was scribbled on a piece of torn tissue paper. The message written in Hindi read: “Land na karna, Is flight me bomb hai” (Do not land, there is a bomb in this flight).
As soon as the threat was established, the plane was parked in an isolated terminal without disclosing details of what was happening to passengers.
The bomb squad and CISF were called in to conduct thorough searches of both the plane and the luggage checked in by the passengers. They combed through the aircraft and ran metal detectors on all luggage bags. However, after scouring every corner of the plane, officials called it a hoax threat.
“All the passengers were double-checked and handwriting samples were collected from everyone. The baggage of all flyers were isolated and individual checks carried out,” said an CISF official.
Indigo as well as KIA operator Bangalore International Airport Limited are yet to respond to the issue.
In a similar incident, on May 19, a man from West Bengal was arrested in Bengaluru for making a fake bomb threat call to the Kempegowda International Airport. According to police, the accused wanted to trap his brother-in-law in the case and made a call to the police control room and identified himself as Deepak. The accused has been identified as Shubhashish Gupta, who had earlier worked at the airport.
A complaint was filed with the Vidhana Soudha police by a sub-inspector of the Command Centre in the office of the Commissioner of Police in Bengaluru after the agencies declared the airport safe and said the call was a hoax. The Vidhana Soudha police immediately started investigations and traced the accused’s mobile number which he used to make the hoax call to the airport.
