NEW DELHI: A 23-year-old UPSC aspirant was arrested in Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur for allegedly making a hoax threat call claiming that a Pakistan-based organisation was planning bomb blasts in Delhi and had selected his former roommate to carry out the attacks. The accused later turned out to have made the call as a prank on his former roommates.
The accused, identified as Suraj, a resident of Auraiya in Uttar Pradesh, was traced and apprehended.
The complainant, Suman Kumar, a native of Bihar and a resident of Indra Vikas Colony, Mukherjee Nagar, is a civil services aspirant, told Mukherjee Nagar police that his roommate, Rohit Kumar, had received a call from an unknown landline number.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (northwest) Akanksha Yadav said during the investigation, police traced the landline number used to make the threatening call to Kanpur. A police team went to the city and, in coordination with the local police, raided the identified location.
Investigators found that Suraj was also a UPSC aspirant and had previously lived in the same accommodation with Suman and Rohit, the DCP said.
To prank his former roommate, the accused allegedly used a landline phone installed at a relative's house in Kanpur and deliberately modulated his voice to create the impression that the caller was associated with an organisation operating from Pakistan.
The threatening call was thus found to be a hoax, Yadav said.
During the conversation, the caller introduced himself with a religious greeting and claimed that an organisation based in Lahore, Pakistan, had been monitoring them and had selected them to carry out bomb blasts in Delhi, a senior police officer said.
When the complainant tried to deter the caller by claiming that his father was a cabinet minister in the Uttar Pradesh government, the caller made derogatory political remarks before disconnecting the call.