It takes no more than a rupee’s worth for any mischief-monger to make a hoax bomb call.
This, however, translates to thousands of police man-hours, with hundreds of investigators of different wings forced into searches in a building or a locality. Trains are halted, schools closed, offices evacuated and business transactions stopped for hours together.
Ninety per cent of such mischief-mongers go scot-free as they remain untraced, having used public telephone booths to make threat calls.
Joining the hoax bandwagon, though not on that scale, are emails warning of bombs being planted.
In an interesting case reported in September 2011, the Cyber Crime wing of the Hyderabad Central Crime Station received a mail from an unidentified person, maintaining that Improvised Explosive Devices were planted at five places in and around Hyderabad.
As two such mails landed a day before the final procession of the Ganesh idol immersion, a tensed police began combing the nook and corner of the city. With the procession passing off peacefully, they heaved a sigh of relief.
However, some probe agencies were immediately on the sender’s tail, tracing the email to a Dubai-based server, using the sender’s IP address. However, they could not zero in on the sender as he had not logged in to the account since.
“Apparently, the sender created the ID specifically to send the threat mail and took caution not to get tracked by using it again,” an investigator said.
The cops kept their nose to the grindstone, eventually identifying the sender as an NRI from Old City’s Falaknuma. They then issued circulars to domestic and international airports in the country.
For the next 21 months, they lay in wait.
A week ago when store supervisor Viqaruddin landed at the airport, the intelligence wing alerted the CCS sleuths who picked him up from his house. The arrested person was completely taken aback, when police knocked on his doors.
Police have ruled out terror links to the accused.
“There is no specific motive too. He was hurt over the objectionable religious campaigns in social media and felt the police were not doing anything to control it,” the investigators said. Angered over the ‘inaction of the police’, he wanted to make them run around and sent the email.
