Gujarat: 10 Rajkot Hotels Receive Hoax Bomb Threats: ‘Hurry Up And Evacuate,’ Reads Email

By Nidhi Giri
Sat, 26 Oct 2024 09:06 PM (IST)
Source:JND

Gujarat: At least ten hotels in Rajkot received bomb threat emails on Saturday, later confirmed as hoaxes, police said. The emails, received around 12:45 pm, prompted police and the bomb disposal squad to conduct thorough searches of the hotels, said SM Jadeja, Inspector of the Special Operations Group (SOG). The email sender, identifying himself as "Kan Den," claimed he had planted bombs in ten hotels, set to detonate in a few hours.

“I placed bombs in every location of your hotel. The bombs will go off in a few hours. Many innocent lives will be lost today. Hurry up and evacuate the hotel,” read the message. After nearly five hours of searching, no suspicious items were found, Inspector Jadeja said, adding that an investigation is underway to identify the sender.

In the past 12 days, over 275 flights operated by Indian carriers have received hoax bomb threats, mostly through social media. On Friday alone, more than 25 domestic and international flights were targeted.

While all flights landed safely, these threats caused significant disruption and even some international flights had to divert to Canada and Germany, and prompted fighter jets to escort planes over Britain and Singapore.

Amid this wave of hoax threats, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Friday issued an advisory to all the social media platforms and asked them to adhere to the provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Rules and Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS). It has asked Meta to make "reasonable efforts to disallow such malicious acts, including hoax bomb threats, from being disseminated on their platforms."

According to TOI, the ministry of electronics notes in its advisory notes that "the scale of spread of such hoax bomb threats has been observed to be dangerously unrestrained due to the availability of the option of "forwarding/re-sharing/re-posting/re-tweeting" on the social media platforms. Such hoax bomb threats are mostly misinformation that is massively disrupting the public order, operations of airlines and security of the airline travellers."