Hyderabad: Bomb hoax calls have been keeping the city police and bomb detection squads busy. After the Nalgonda encounter between the police and Simi suspects there have been over 10 hoax calls about bombs and armed men at railway stations, temples and public places in Cyberabad, Hyderabad and surrounding districts.
A similar trend was noticed after the Dilsukhnagar bomb blast. Though the police could not arrest all the fake callers the arrested callers were found to have done it for ‘fun.’
Some callers wanted to test if the police would really take action on such alerts. Last year the police received 38 hoax calls. Around 50 fake calls were received soon after the Dilsukhnagar blasts.
Police officials say that most calls came from public telephones (coin phones) making it difficult to trace the caller. However, some people used their own mobile phones or their relatives' phones to make the calls.
Once a man called the emergency service and said that a bomb was planted on the Narsapur Express at the Nampally railway station and the train was delayed by three hours. The police found that it was a hoax and arrested the caller.
The caller, N. Govinda, who used his own mobile phone to make the call, was a farmer from Maddipadu mandal of Prakasam district. When police questioned him he said that he wanted to know if the police would really take action.
On the day of the incident he had come to Hyderabad to visit his son who works at Kukatpally. When he reached Nampally at around 4 pm in a train he made the call and switched off his phone. He witnessed the search silently and went back to his native place, railway police officials said.
"In most hoax cases the fake callers did it for fun or out of frustration. We are still investigating cases to trace anonymous callers," said Secunderabad Railway SP S.J. Janardhan.
A few days after the Nalgonda shootout a college student called the emergency service and said that two AK-47 wielding gunmen were seen in the bushes at Shadnagar.
The police and special teams searched the entire area for two days and found no one. The police then took the youngster into custody, and questioned him. After that he revealed that he did it to see what the cops will do in such situations.
