Bomb threat email to 3 engineering colleges turns out to be hoax

Three engineering colleges in the city received an email claiming to alert them to a “Hydrogen-based IED” placed on their premises on Friday (October 4) afternoon. The police pressed the bomb detection and disposal squad and dog squads at the three locations, carried out extensive anti-sabotage checks and determined that the threats were a hoax.

BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore Institute of Technology, and M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology received the email at around 1 p.m.

“As soon as we received the email, a complaint was lodged at the Basavanagudi police station. The students were immediately evacuated from the college. As no bomb was found, it was found to be a fake bomb threat email,” said Bheemsha, Principal of BMS College of Engineering, Basavanagudi.

“The police are probing the genesis of this email. We have taken all necessary security measures including metal detectors being installed in our college. Students need not worry,” said J. Prakash, Vice Principal of Bangalore Institute of Technology.

T.N. BJP leader 

The email, purportedly from Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party leader S.Ve. Shekher, who is also a popular actor and former MLA, claims that “bombs were placed in select colleges” to divert media attention from “the imminent Jaffer Sadiq case involving the DMK”.

The email claims that “TN DGP Shankar Jiwal has colluded with Pak ISI cells in Coimbatore to carry out this operation in selected colleges”. The email also concludes by asking colleges not to mention “his or IPS officer V. Balakrishnan’s involvement” in alerting them. 

A senior city police official said it had now come to their notice that similar emails were sent to institutions with such claims in the name of the TN BJP leader in Tamil Nadu. “We have registered a case and are trying to track down the IP address of the system used to send this email,” he said. 

It can be recalled that schools in Bengaluru had received similar hoax bomb threat emails in 2022 and 2023. Probe into both the cases hit a dead end and remains unsolved.

Published - October 04, 2024 07:53 pm IST