Decoding the hoax bomb threat ‘trend’ at airports and schools

COIMBATORE: Sabarinathan (42) sat at the Chennai Airport on June 18 waiting to take his usual business trip to Dubai when he was informed that the flight would be delayed by a couple of hours.

When he finally did board his flight and reach his destination, he was bombarded with calls from panicked family members who informed him about the ‘bomb threat’ at the airport that was all over the news.

Instantly, the tense-looking cops pacing up and down the premises and their hush-hush conversations while passengers were made to wait began to make sense to him. “I’m glad the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. But if it was not? I shudder when I think about it! And, it bothers me that my family had to undergo so much fear and anxiety,” said Sabarinathan.

What unfolds

Not just Chennai, but over 40 airports in the country had received an email that day stating, “There are explosives hidden in the airport. The bombs will soon explode. You will all die.”

Upon receiving the information, the entire entourage of cops, the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS), and sniffer dogs were pressed into action. After a thorough search, the teams discovered the threat to be a hoax, just as they had suspected. However, this is not a situation that can be taken lightly or dealt with carelessly, said Coimbatore city police commissioner V Balakrishnan.

“The minute we receive information about such threats, we pull all the personnel who have routine duty and engage them in the search. An entire day goes by in anxiety and despite knowing it could be a mere hoax call, we get the job done,” the senior cop stated.

On June 24, nearly 60 airports received bomb threats from an email id Longlivepalestine@dnmx.org, which claimed that there were pipe bombs placed inside the airports. It too turned out to be a hoax.

Emails, which are sent using the dark web, bounce off different IP addresses, making it a nightmare to track. Balakrishnan pointed out, “Invariably, it shows that these threats were sent from a foreign country. When we try to track them further, the signal skips across continents. For all you know, the person orchestrating this could be sitting two streets away equipped with a computer with a barely decent Internet connection.”

SOP never fails

When top officials dole out orders after receiving bomb threats, the ground-level cops execute them like the well-oiled machines they are.

“It’s the same drill no matter how many times such calls or mail land. We never take it lightly as it involves people’s lives. We immediately jump into action and engage the standard operating procedure (SOP),” said an official who is part of the Coimbatore airport security posse.

The SOP kicks into place the moment a bomb threat call comes in where the staff are coached to ask the right questions and retrieve as much information from the caller. This information is passed on to the unit heads and after a meeting with the airport authorities, the BDDS and sniffer dogs are brought to scan the premises.

“We quickly assemble the BDDS team and the dog squad, and run a search with our equipment around the outside perimeter as the CISF personnel are in charge of security inside the airport,” explained P Sathian, a member of the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad in Coimbatore.

When every inch of the area has been scanned and the threat is proven to be a hoax, normalcy is restored at the airport, but the cops still have their work cut out for them as they have to register an FIR and begin a formal investigation into the hoax call. “We go to extraordinary lengths to trace the calls and once the caller is apprehended, we find out their motive. We check if they have any grievances that led to them making the call and see if it can be resolved,” the airport security official explained. “It’s stressful. The second a threatening call or an email lands, we drop everything, and make the investigation our priority. And then, we find that over 6-7 valuable hours from a working day are taken away because of a wild goose chase.”

Threat goes high-tech

Cyber security personnel however observed that the real investigation begins only after the declaration of the hoax. Gone are the days when some annoyed person picked up a phone and made threat calls. Now with modern technology, even the problems are modern with most pranksters going the anonymous email way.

“But trying to track the person behind the email is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Inspector Arun attached to the cybercrime unit of the Coimbatore police. “Criminals use TOR and VPN networks that help them camouflage IP addresses and exact locations, and makes it look like the emails are coming in from various continents. Even in bomb threats that landed in the last week of June, the mail looked like it originated from South Korea but when we tried tracing further, it kept bouncing to different countries.”

Talking about the personalities of the people who make such threats, Commissioner Balakrishnan said that most calls come from users who are under the influence of alcohol or people having psychological disorders. “These callers either have a vendetta against someone or they seek attention through such activities that cause trauma to others,” he added. “Recently, a prank caller was discovered to be a 13-year-old. Such minors are sent for counselling to address the source of their grievance and are let off with a warning.”

Schools aren’t spared

As even schools are now getting bomb threats, the issue becomes even more sensitive. “More often than not, the caller is just someone who is frustrated with the school management,” said the Commissioner. “The kind of pandemonium such calls create was endless.”

A senior police official from Chennai told DT Next, “At the airport, being a multi-agency-monitored facility, we follow certain procedures in investigation along with the bureau of civil aviation security. But even in the case of schools, we receive emails from IDs (with masked IP addresses) that are difficult to trace back but we are working on it.”

As pranksters keep getting a high out of putting security agencies in a fix for a few hours, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security recently proposed a five-year flying ban on such persons, in light of the numerous incidents across the country in June. Already, making such fake threats and disrupting public life is a punishable offence under Chapter 22 of the Indian Penal Code and attracts imprisonment of two to seven years.