NEW DELHI: It was hardly the first instance when Delhi schools received threat mails insinuating the presence of explosives at school premises. Rather several schools in the national capital have received similar hoax threats in the past; and one common consequence, panic.
The threat mail that reached DPS RK Puram in February this year, claiming that two bombs had been placed within the school premises, remains untraced to an accused even to this day. According to a senior Delhi Police official, a team of cyber police station, investigating the case, had found that the alleged miscreants used a foreign IP address, indicating either the perpetrators are sitting in some other country or masking their IP address.
“The case is very tough to be cracked as the accused were using a foreign IP address and a Tor browser on the dark web,” an officer privy to the probe told this newspaper.
The Tor browser can be used for secure and anonymous internet surfing, even on the dark web. As per cyber experts, Tor is a system of network encryption that protects your privacy and anonymity online.
The police in its investigation into the DPS Mathura bomb threat case have so far found that the alleged mail was written in “sub-standard” English. “The sentence construction was not right. There were even grammatical mistakes. It seems that the message was first written in a regional language and then translated into English,” the officer said. The police have also found out that the email ID through which the threat mail was generated, was created on the very same day i.e. February 2.
Threats unabated
In September last year, the Lal Bahadur Shastri School in RK Puram received an email threatening a bomb in the school premises that later turned out to be a hoax. In May, 2023, the Delhi Public School in Mathura Road received a similar hoax bomb scare. The Indian School in Sadiq Nagar received two bomb threats, the last on April 12, 2023, via email. The first one was over the phone in November 2022. Both turned out to be hoaxes. The threat to DPS Mathura Road in May, 2023, was probed and a student was found involved, who said he wanted to prank the school for the kicks.