Bomb hoax streak continues

As many as six schools in Delhi-NCR - five in Delhi and one in Noida - received bomb threat emails prompting security agencies to conduct a thorough search operation. Nothing suspicious was found on their premises, following which the threats were declared as hoax. This is the sixth such incident in the past 11 days in the Capital.

A Fire Department official told The Tribune that they received a call regarding the bomb threat from DPS Dwarka at 5.02 am, following which a fire tender-cum-rescue vehicle was sent to the spot.

The police also reached the school and launched a search operation with the help of sniffer dogs and bomb disposal squads.

While a search operation was underway at DPS Dwarka, several other schools, including Krishna Model Public School in Jafarpur, Vishal Bharti in Paschim Vihar and Ekta Model School in Najafgarh, raised an alarm about receiving a similar threat.

Lotus Valley International School in Noida asked parents not to send their children to the school due to “an emergency situation”.

Security agencies responded to all SOS calls and checked the premises of every school for couple of hours. When they did not find anything suspicious, the threat were declared as hoax.

Over 300 schools received threats this year

Delhi has been grappling with back-to-back ‘hoax’ bomb threats prompting security agencies to conduct massive search and evacuation operations. Since the beginning of this year, several schools, hospitals, Tihar jail, Delhi Airport, colleges and even the Ministry of Home Affairs have received threatening emails several times.

In total, more than 300 schools have received hoax bomb threats this year in Delhi and its satellite cities.

On May 1, 2024, the police in the national capital and its surrounding areas went into a tizzy after nearly 150 schools in entire Delhi-NCR received emails that mentioned explosives being planted on the school premises.

Though the threats were declared as hoax, the police registered an FIR claiming that the emails were sent by antisocial elements with an intention to create mass panic in the city. The case was handed over to the special cell. The cops are yet to make any headway.

Foreign IPs, VPN

A senior police officer privy to the investigation said such cases were extremely tough to be cracked as the suspects always use a foreign IP address and a Tor Browser on a dark web.

The investigation into a threat mail sent to DPS RK Puram in February this year revealed that the alleged suspects used a foreign-based IP address, raising suspicion that either they are sitting in some other country or masking their IP address.

In another hoax threat mail case reported earlier this year, cops found that the alleged mail, also seen by this newspaper, was written with poor English.

“The sentence construction was not right. Even there were grammatical mistakes. It seems that the message was first written in the regional language and then translated into English,” the officer said. Even the email id through which the threat mail was sent was created on the very same day i.e. February 2.

Senior officers said investigations were still on. They had written to multiple service providers in the past year to determine the exact origin of the senders.