A former IT professional gave some tense moments to officials at the Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru on Monday when he made a hoax call to the terminal manager, saying a bomb was placed on board a Mumbai-bound Air India flight.
The attempt by Pratik Thakore Mahesh to delay the flight misfired and he is in judicial custody now. The flight departed 40 minutes late due to the hoax call.
According to sources in the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Mahesh (49), his wife and 17-year-old son were running late to the airport to board Air India flight no. AI 610 which was to depart at 7.10 pm with 144 passengers on board.
"Since the boarding gate for the flight was already closed when the family reached the Air India counter, the staff member refused to hand over the boarding pass. This made Mahesh extremely agitated," a source said.
Mahesh then moved aside and made a call to the terminal manager at 6.57 pm, pretending that he was a caller from Hyderabad and wanted to alert the airport about a bomb inside AI 610.
The manager immediately contacted the Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) which handles bomb threats inside the airport and on flights. "The flight was moved to an isolation bay. BTAC convened a meeting at 7.20 pm."
The intelligence wing of CISF used a caller identification app to trace the call, which showed the passenger's surname alone. "We asked for the list of passengers and found members of a family from Surat bearing the surname Thakore who had not boarded. Using CCTV footage, they identified the family and found the three inside the airport," the source said.
Asked to hand over his phone, Mahesh, presently unemployed, said he had lost it. After repeated queries, he confessed that he had made the call, switched off the phone and put it in his wife's bag. The Samsung phone was retrieved by the police from her bag and it had proof of the outgoing call to the terminal manager.
The flight was allowed to take off at 7.50 pm after it became clear that there was no threat to the passengers' safety. "The CISF cracked the case within 30 minutes without causing much inconvenience to passengers," another source said, adding, "Mahesh confessed to us that in his desperation to board the flight, he had tried to delay it somehow."
Mahesh was handed over to the airport police on Monday night. An FIR was filed at the airport police station on Tuesday under IPC Sections 505 (Punishment for statements conducive to public mischief) and 507 (Criminal intimidation by anonymous communication). "He was produced before the Devanahalli magistrate, who denied him bail. Mahesh has been remanded in judicial custody in Chikballapur," the source added.