Unclaimed bags found at different places, including a busy market, put the Capital on an edge on Monday evening. However, the calls later turned out to be false alarms.
High drama followed after the Police Control Room received a call around 3-40 p.m. about an unclaimed laptop bag lying on a pavement next to the Army Base Hospital in Delhi Cantonment.
The police cordoned off the area and traffic was blocked on all roads leading up to the hospital. Teams from the Army and the police, including the sniffer dog squad and the bomb detection squad, immediately reached the spot. Senior officers also rushed in to supervise the operation.
During the exercise, one of the sniffer dogs started barking fuelling suspicion about the presence of some explosives in the black bag. However, on checking the contents of the bag later the police found a purse, a towel, a broken brick and a bar of soap kept inside. Subsequently the call was declared bogus. Movement of vehicles was restored at 6-50 p.m.
According to the police, two men on a two-wheeler had intercepted a car and tried to hand over the laptop bag to the car owner who refused to accept it. “The car owner, who got a little suspicious, threw the bag aside on the pavement and made a call to the police control room,” said a senior police officer.
Vital installations such as the Army College of Medical Sciences and an Assam Rifles office and a metro construction site are located close to where the bag was found.
In another incident reported at M-Block Market in Greater Kailash-I, a call was made to the police about an abandoned motorcycle with a carrier bag. The owner of the motorcycle was not around when the call was made.
As the police reached there and started enquiring, the owner of the motorcycle reached there and informed the police that the motorcycle and the bag was his. When the police checked the bag, they found items belonging to the motorcycle owner.
Similar “hoax” calls were received by the Outer District and Central District Police. Unclaimed articles were found at two places in Darya Ganj and in the S-Block Market of Mangolpuri in the evening. In one of the bags, the police found speakers belonging to a person who had forgotten to take it along.
