Every day the police place themselves in the line of fire. Last week, a head constable attached to C.K. Acchukattu police station showed exemplary courage when he opened a carton box, which was suspected to have contained explosives, dumped outside the house of a seer.
The policeman, who had rushed to the spot when the alert was raised, read the threatening letter, which was found at the crime scene and immediately took charge. Wasting no time, he donned his safety gear and opened the box. Concealed inside the styrofoam was a firecracker.
Once the hoax was revealed, passersby and locals lauded his bravery, but the constable shrugged off their praise saying that he relied on common sense to confirm the hoax.
“First of all, terrorists don’t make announcements before carrying out terror attacks. Secondly, the letter was probably not from terrorists as it was written in Kannada,” he said.
Bengaluru has seen many threats and hoaxes in the recent past.
Security was tightened at the Consulate General of France last month after it received a threat letter claiming to be from the Al-Qaeda. The letter claimed that it would carry out terror activities if the French president visited India on Republic Day.
Though senior police officers termed it a hoax, they carried out a routine drill to sanitise the area. “Though we knew from the beginning it was a hoax, we followed standard operating procedure, which had to be taken up considering the sensitivity of the place,” a senior police officer said.
(Reporting by Imran Gowhar)
