‘Emergency’ at Thiruvananthapuram airport after bomb threat on Air India flight

A full emergency has been declared at Thiruvananthapuram Airport on Thursday following a bomb threat on an Air India flight arriving from Mumbai.

The flight landed at the airport around 8am and was directed to an isolation bay and passengers were safely evacuated by 8.44am.

The threat was communicated by the pilot around 7.30am as the aircraft neared Thiruvananthapuram airport. There were 135 passengers on board, and further details on the threat’s origin and other information are still pending, PTI reported.

Following the communication, a full emergency was declared at the airport at 7.36 am. There has been no impact on life and airport operations are currently uninterrupted, the report added.

However, details on the origin of the threat and other information are awaited.

“A specific security alert was detected on Air India flight AI657 during cruise from Mumbai to Thiruvananthapuram on August 22. The flight has landed safely in Thiruvananthapuram and has been parked in a remote bay for the mandatory checks by security agencies. All passengers and crew disembarked safely,” ANI quoted Air India spokesperson as saying.

On June 17, authorities detained a 13-year-old boy for allegedly sending an email to Delhi Airport falsely claiming that a bomb had been planted on a Dubai-bound flight.

An emergency was declared by airport authorities upon receiving the email, and Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport was placed on high alert.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (IGI Airport) Usha Rangnani said that the boy sent the email “just for fun” after being influenced by news of another teenager who had made a hoax bomb threat call a few days earlier.

Hoax bomb threats to airports and hospitals have increased in recent times. On June 18, 41 airports including those in Jaipur, Chennai and Varanasi received bomb threat over emails. This led to extensive anti-sabotage checks that lasted for hours, but all the threats were found to be hoaxes.

Earlier, around 60 hospitals across Mumbai had also received hoax emails about bombs kept in their premises. Mumbai police had said this included both private and public hospitals and all emails were sent using Virtual Private Networks (VPN) to the hospital’s public mail-id’s.

Hoax bomb threats and messages disrupt flight schedules and also require a thorough inspection of all passengers, their luggage and the entire aircraft. Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) had proposed a five-year flying ban for those found guilty of such acts.