BENGALURU: High tension prevailed as an Indigo flight carrying 175 passengers from Jaipur to Bengaluru on Sunday night just before it could land at Kempegowda International Airport after an anonymous message citing a bomb on board the flight was found scrawled on a tissue paper in a toilet.
The Flight Captain contacted the security agencies at KIA and landed the flight after receiving clearance. The threat turned out to be a hoax message.
A security official said this message in Hindi was found by a cabin crew member on tissue paper inside flight No. 6E 556 in the rear toilet, “Land na karna, Is flight me bomb hai” (Do not land, there is a bomb in this flight).
A staff who spotted the bomb threat message alerted the cockpit crew who then contacted the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and the Air Traffic Control unit. “After the Flight Captain was given permission to land, the flight landed after 9.30 pm. It was taken to an isolated bay,” said a reliable source.
The Bomb Disposal and Detection squad, dog squad and CISF carried out massive checks. “All the passengers were double checked and handwriting samples were collected from everyone. The baggage of all flyers were isolated and individual checks carried out,” said a top source.
The samples of suspected passengers have been sent to the Forensics Science Lab for examination. The possibility that someone else could have written it and the tissue merely left behind by a passenger inside the toilet was also being explored.
A top security source said, “This incident is a wake-up call. There is a need to fix cameras outside the toilets to keep a tab on those entering it so that such suspects could be narrowed down easily.”
The next Indigo flight between the cities, 6E 6182 took off from Bengaluru to Jaipur only at 1.04 am on Monday morning, late by 3 hours and 14 minutes. It is not clear if this was related to the bomb hoax incident.
Indigo as well as KIA operator Bangalore International Airport Limited are yet to respond to the issue.