NEW DELHI: An Air India Express flight IX-196 flying from Dubai to Jaipur, with 189 passengers onboard, received a bomb threat via email during the wee hours of Saturday. However, authorities have confirmed that nothing suspicious was found after the plane landed at the Jaipur International airport.
“After a thorough check by the security forces, nothing suspicious was found,” Jaipur Airport Police SHO Sandeep Basera said news agency ANI.
This comes after a Vistara‘s Delhi-London flight of October 18 was diverted to Frankfurt late on Friday night due to a similar hoax call. After being thoroughly checked and getting security cleared, it took off from there 2.5 hours later for its destination.
The email is also the latest in a series of hoax threat messages Indian flight carriers have been receiving for a week now, where over 40 flights have been affected.
As hoax threat messages to Indian airlines continue to be on the rise, the civil aviation minister recently assured the public that necessary actions were being taken and ruled out any larger conspiracy behind these events, describing them as “petty” pranks by minors and pranksters.
“Action is being taken on this. We can’t comment on any kind of a conspiracy but from whatever little bit we know these calls are coming from some minors and pranksters. These are all minor and isolated incidents. There is no kind of conspiracy that we can comment on. From our side, we are going to see what best we can do. We are talking to the airlines, security agencies, within the ministry also. Consultations are going on,” Union civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu said on Thursday.
It is also believed that the Union aviation ministry is working on a deterrent by by working on new rules to deal with hoax callers and punish them severely, including putting them on no fly list.
(More details awaited)