AHMEDABAD: Security was stepped up at Gujarat’s Rajkot District Court after the Rajkot Bar Association received a threatening email at 10:03 AM on Tuesday, warning of a bomb blast at the court at 3:11 PM.
The message, which invoked Khalistani slogans and named senior political leaders, also issued a series of threats targeting sensitive locations across Gujarat.
According to the email, a bomb blast was allegedly planned at Gujarat’s Rajkot District Court at 3:11 PM. At the same time, the sender threatened drone attacks along the Vadinar Port–Nayara Refinery corridor and from Sikka Port to Jamnagar, raising concerns over possible threats to strategically important coastal and industrial installations.
The email further claimed that a bomb could be detonated using an iPhone battery at Mahatma Mandir at 4:11 PM. It also contained slogans while threatening violence.
Following receipt of the email, Rajkot Bar Association president Sumit Vora alerted the court manager and police authorities. Consequently, local police, the Special Operations Group (SOG), bomb-detection teams and a dog squad launched an immediate search operation across the court premises.
Despite the high-alert response, no suspicious object was found during the search. Nevertheless, security agencies are treating the email seriously and have begun examining its origin, sender details and possible links to other recent bomb-threat cases in Gujarat.
Vora said the threat email was received at both the court's official email address and the Rajkot Bar Association's email address. He added that the message allegedly referred to Canada-based Khalistani leaders associated with Babbar Khalsa International (BKI).
Meanwhile, investigators are examining whether Tuesday's Rajkot threat is connected to the recent Gandhinagar bomb-threat email case, in which two accused were arrested from Bhagalpur in Bihar and Deoghar in Jharkhand.
The development assumes significance because Gujarat Police's Cyber Centre of Excellence recently busted an interstate bomb-threat email syndicate allegedly targeting government offices, schools, colleges and courts across the state.
During the investigation, police recovered a database containing 5,13,847 unique email IDs along with their corresponding passwords. Investigators suspect the accounts were intended for sending threatening emails to government institutions and could also have been used for other cybercrimes and illegal activities.
Therefore, investigators are now expected to check whether the email address used to threaten the Rajkot court appears in the recovered list. If a match is established, it could provide a crucial link between the Rajkot threat and the wider interstate cyber-threat network.
For now, no explosive or suspicious material has been found at the Rajkot court, but the combination of the court threat, Khalistani references, drone warnings and the alleged Mahatma Mandir threat has put security agencies on heightened alert.
