Following a blast outside a Central Reserve Police Force school in Delhi on Sunday, multiple hoax calls of bomb threats have been received by schools acoss the country, raising tension among the masses in India.
Along with the CPRF, airlines have also been receiving bomb threats. Times of India reported that several schools, ten flights and 30 airlines have received threats so far, while the total number of threats has surged to more than 100 in a week.
The threats were sent via email to the management of the schools late Monday night.
Various international and local flights had to be diverted, causing inconvenience to the passengers.
An India Today report about the hoax calls reveals that many of the callers have used VPNs with IP addresses tracing them to the UK and Germany, making the process of tracking them complicated.
Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu was initially seen saying that the hoax calls had been made by minors and pranksters. Talking to ANI News Agency he said, “Whatever we know right now is that they are all individual people, most of them minors, who don’t understand the whole idea of what they are doing and they are creating this kind of inconvenience.”
However, in a recent statement, he advocated stronger laws to combat these hoax bomb calls. He told the media that the Aviation ministry is consulting with the Home ministry to bring changes to the constitution. The proposed legislation suggests a five-year imprisonment for offenders and their placement on a no-fly list.
Aviation expert Vandana Singh, while talking to India Today, stressed that this is not just about the image of the aviation industry anymore but about the “image of the country.”
Meanwhile, the widespread problem of these hoax calls has put security agencies on high alert as more than 40,000 armed personnel have been deployed at airports across the country.
