NEW DELHI: The Delhi Police on Tuesday said it had identified a juvenile who had made hoax bomb threats to schools last year. The cops claimed that the juvenile’s parent worked with an organisation that was linked to an NGO having “deep connections” with a political party.
The police further claimed that the NGO was the one that had questioned the legitimacy of the hanging of terrorist Afzal Guru, the convict behind the 2001 Parliament attack.
“Schools had been receiving (bomb threat) emails continuously, it started around February 14. So, we conducted an in-depth investigation. But due to the usage of VPN etc, it was not easy to get a breakthrough…But we found a technical window regarding the email received on January 8. We zeroed in on a juvenile and found that he sent the mail…We suspected an anti-national or sabotage angle,” special CP law & order Madhup Tiwari told news agency ANI.
Highlighting that it was only a preliminary investigation, Tiwari further said: “When we did the profiling of the family of the juvenile as part of the investigation, we found that one of his parents is connected to an organisation with deep connections to an NGO. As per our preliminary info, it was found that the NGO has deep connections to a particular political party. It supports that political party on several issues and had also questioned the legitimacy of the hanging of Afzal Guru.”
“Further investigation is yet to be done…He had been sending the mail since the beginning. There are at least 7 instances where we can say that it was he who sent the emails,” Madhup Tiwari added.
Last year, the incidents of hoax calls were on the rise, with numerous flights, schools and colleges getting threats via emails or phone calls.
Domestic airlines faced nearly 1,000 hoax bomb threats up to November 13 last year, according to the government.
Minister of state for civil aviation, Muralidhar Mohol informed the Rajya Sabha on November 25 that a total of 1,143 hoax bomb threats were recorded between August 2022 and November 13, 2024.
In 2024 alone, between January and November 13, there 994 threats were received.
