IndiGo flight 6E 7308, carrying passengers from Jabalpur to Hyderabad, had to be diverted to Nagpur on Sunday following a bomb threat. All the passengers were safely evacuated from the aircraft upon landing at Nagpur, and the necessary security drills were immediately carried out, according to IndiGo.
The airline said, “Some passengers had to be accommodated and with food and beverages.” The airline apologized to anyone it inconvenienced.
The increase in hoax bomb threats in the last several months is apparent, and they have included airports and hospitals as targets. On June 18, 41 airports, including Jaipur, Chennai, and Varanasi, received bomb threats through e-mail. All were subjected to anti-sabotage checks, which proved the bomb threats to be hoaxes.
Such hoax threats affect flight timings and, in addition, require careful checkups of passengers, baggage, and airplanes. In this regard, concerning such threats, the flying ban by the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) has filed to act accordingly by giving out a flying ban for five years.
Previous events are as follows: Bomb on 22nd August at Thiruvananthapuram airport where an Air India flight from Mumbai was safely taken to Kozhikode and evacuated. Also, on June 17, a boy of 13 years was arrested for an alleged hoax after he claimed that there was a bomb on a flight bound for Dubai.
In another worrying trend, about 60 hospitals in Mumbai also got bomb threats by e-mail, the messages having been sent using VPNs.
