Pranksters rile bomb squads

“While it definitely is unnecessary loss of man hours for our teams, we can’t afford to take a chance, especially after the twin blasts in the Bangalore- Guwahati superfast express at Central railway station on May 1 this year,” a senior police official said. The city woke up to the news of the blasts on a lazy Sunday morning on which a 24-year-old woman techie, Swathi Parchuri, was killed and many other passengers suffered injuries.

There is a visible increase in such hoax threats post May 1, the officer said. One of the reasons he attributes is post-blast media coverage. In the past three months alone, around 25 such threats were reported in the city, of which at least 20 were made to the City police control room. Some callers even direct their threats to 108-ambulance helpline, as in the case of actor Ajith Kumar.

“We have always treated bomb threats with extreme caution, even though 99 % of the time they turn out to be hoax,” an official of the Central Crime Branch (CCB) said. Tasked with the job of tracing such calls, the Cyber cell of the CCB, leaves no stone unturned.

A senior CCB official recalls, ‘Exactly five days after the blasts on May 1, a prankster had issued a bomb threat to the Central railway station and the government general hospital. The call was made from a Bengaluru sim. He was traced and arrested from his hideout in Villupuram district.”

In spite of the police tracing and booking such callers in most cases, it does not seem to deter them as the number of such calls has not come down, as is made evident from such calls in the past three months. Handing out a severe warning to such callers, a 16-year-old school student, who issued a hoax threat to his school last week (September 8), was remanded by the city police and sent to a reform home, a move which police hopes would prove effective in deterring other such young pranksters.

Headquartered at the old police commissioner’s office in Egmore, the teams are dispatched to any area of the city after a threat call, apart from their routine security operations during VIP visits and public events.

In case of a threat, the local police officials are alerted and they cordon off the area and evacuate the civilians (if present) until the BDDS arrives, the official says while explaining the squad’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

The bomb squad personnel, with specialised instruments and sniffer dogs in tow, sweep the premises. The thorough operation lasts anywhere from two to six hours before a bomb threat is declared a hoax. On grounds of security they refuse to field questions on what the squads are equipped with.

Our teams screen arriving trains, attend to unattended cargo packages on a regular basis and sweep the entire premises in case of a call. “We always keep a tab on vehicles in the parking area that are parked for days.

The porters and other workers also inform us of unattended cargo packages,” BDDS personnel said. Most of them are trained at the TN Commando School in Marutham, Chennai.

Pranksters, students who want a break from their school / college routine and relatives seeking revenge are the usual suspects in hoax bomb threats. They are usually let off with a warning, but now the police make sure these callers have cases booked against them in order to serve them a lesson. Most recently, on September 9, a class-11 student of a city school faced the music for issuing a bomb threat to his school in Virugambakkam. The local police remanded the boy, sending him to a reform home.

The case of 23-year-old S. Sivakumar arrested by CCB on May 7 is peculiar. This school dropout from Bengaluru had issued bomb threats to the Central railway station, just five days after the place witnessed a twin blasts on May 1. When picked up from his hideout at Anumandur village in Villupuram district he had told the police, “I made the hoax call in order to create panic in the minds of public and also wanted to see that it is covered in the media,”

Earlier, when he was laid off for misconduct from a snack stall in Saidapet after eight months of work, he sought revenge by making a hoax call about a cylinder blast in the stall and that it was on fire, police said.

He had even cheated people by calling the numbers on ‘person missing’ posters in the city bus stops and railway stations, demanding money in exchange for information, police said. Thilakavathi, 68, is, however, old school. She wrote a bomb threat letter to the Arakonam railway station on December 2, last year. In it, she claimed, that three of her relatives were planning to blow up the Melapakkam station. This was her idea of framing them to settle a property dispute among the family members. She was arrested five days later.

A disgruntled husband wants his wife to quit her job he calls her office and issues a bomb threat, recalled a senior police official. The husband was let off with a warning though.