A state of emergency was declared at Thiruvananthapuram airport on Thursday after a bomb threat was received on an Air India flight from Mumbai.
The flight landed at the airport at around 8:00 a.m., was directed to an isolation cell, and the passengers were safely evacuated at 8:44 a.m.
The threat was conveyed by the pilot at around 7.30 am as the aircraft approached Thiruvananthapuram airport. There were 135 passengers on board and further details on the origin of the threat and other information are yet to be released, PTI reported.
Following the report, a state of emergency was declared at the airport at 7:36 a.m. There was no impact on life and airport operations are currently uninterrupted, the report continued.
However, details on the origin of the threat and further information are awaited.
“A special security alert was detected on Air India flight AI657 while flying from Mumbai to Thiruvananthapuram on August 22. The flight has landed safely in Thiruvananthapuram and has been parked at a secluded bay for mandatory checks by security authorities. All passengers and crew have disembarked safely,” ANI quoted an Air India spokesperson as saying.
On June 17, authorities arrested a 13-year-old boy for allegedly sending an email to Delhi airport falsely claiming that a bomb had been planted on a flight to Dubai.
After receiving the email, airport authorities declared a state of emergency and placed Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport on high alert.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (IGI Airport) Usha Rangnani said the boy sent the email “just for fun” after being influenced by news about another teenager who made a fake bomb threat call a few days earlier.
False bomb threats against airports and hospitals have been on the rise recently. On June 18, 41 airports, including those in Jaipur, Chennai and Varanasi, received bomb threats via email. This led to extensive sabotage checks lasting hours, but all the threats turned out to be hoaxes.
Earlier, around 60 hospitals in Mumbai had also received false reports of bombs being stored on their premises. Mumbai Police had said that both private and public hospitals were affected and that all emails were sent to the hospitals’ public email addresses through virtual private networks (VPN).
False bomb threats and messages disrupt flight schedules and also require thorough checks of all passengers, their luggage and the entire aircraft. The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) had proposed a five-year flight ban for those guilty of such acts.
