The city police have been kept on their toes this week, as a number of hoax calls have been received.
The latest, a bomb threat to Egmore Railway Station, was received on Saturday night.
According to the police, a call was received at the control room around 11 p.m. on Saturday. The man on the line said that in one hour, there would be a bomb blast at Egmore station. He then disconnected. Officers at the control room immediately alerted the Egmore police, the government railway police and the railway protection force.
The bomb detection squad was pressed into service, and after a thorough inspection of the station premises, the squad declared the call a hoax.
“We found out that the call had been made from a mobile phone. The phone was traced to an address in Periamet,” said a senior police officer.
The police found out that the original owner of the mobile phone was man called Yuvaraj. “When we questioned him, he told us that he had lost his phone a week ago. After ascertaining that his claim was true, we forwarded the mobile number to the cyber crime department for further investigations,” said the officer.
Three days ago, the police control room received a call stating that there was a plot to murder Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, during his visit to Chennai. On the same day, a youngster from R.K. Nagar made a hoax call from a public phone to a hardware shop in Mannady, saying there would be a bomb blast there.
On October 18, two places including the Royapettah police station, received hoax calls about bombs about to go off.
“We are enquiring into all these calls. We will take stern action against those who indulge in such pranks,” said a police officer.
