It was a case of a hoax that had everyone at the ISRO facility in Bengaluru moving fast on Thursday. The email set off an evacuation and a security sweep, making for yet another example of these kinds of false alarms. By the time police were done with their work, they had determined there was no substance to the claim, though they are still on the case to track down who sent it, given the number of like-for-like emails in the city.
What went down at the ISRO campus
Once the email was put on the radar, you could see police and the bomb squad make their way to the ISRO building on new BEL Road. It was a precautionary move to clear the area and run a full sanitisation, as per the officials on the ground.
The checks turned up nothing. Even with the place declared secure and the email put in its place as a sham, the officers didn’t let their guard down over the whole affair.
There is more to it than just this one location
If you ask the police, the ISRO incident is just one in a string of hoaxes aimed at well-known institutions. You have the Karnataka High Court and a few schools in town that have had to deal with the same sort of thing lately, with all the evacuations and searching that entails. This isn’t without precedent. Go back to last year and you’ll find a spate of Delhi schools – DPS Dwarka, Krishna Model, Sarvodaya Vidyalaya among them – had to mount a sizeable security operation after receiving some phony bomb emails.
A man in custody for his part in it
In a separate matter, the Delhi Police have put 36-year-old Nishant Tyagi from Ghaziabad in holding for a run of hoax emails to some of the more secure organisations in the country. His family has it that he has been in treatment for a mental condition for some time, since 2008.
Some of those emails, which came in on June 29, made claims about bombs at various spots. One even made its way to an Air India flight heading to New York from the capital, and you can imagine the kind of response that drew from multiple agencies. In the end, they were all put down as hoaxes. Standard procedure was in effect at every venue as the reports came in.
Putting a finger on the sender
They say two of the accounts used for the ruse were put under a microscope. From there, the digital paper trail pointed to a phone number. With the help of some technical means, the police found their man in Sanyog Nagar, Ghaziabad, on the 30th and had words with him at home. They didn’t come across any explosives or the means to put one together.
Tyagi is something of an open-book when it comes to his schooling; he did some of it the distance way and started a bachelor’s in 2010 but never saw it through. The probe is on to figure out what made him do it and how the emails were dispatched.
Who was in the crosshairs on June 29
The messages made mention of a number of national bodies. Here is the list from the investigators: – DRDO – MoCA – NIA – NPCIL – ISRO
What happens after the fact
You only have to look at the ISRO side of things to see how much of a reaction is needed when a sensitive site is put in the spotlight. It takes time and resources to do the right by the evacuation and the checks, even if you don’t find anything amiss.
There will be legal follow-up, of course, depending on where the probe leads. They are also intent on nailing down the source of the ISRO email and anyone else involved, as part of a larger push against these coordinated stunts.
The message to public institutions is to be ready and stick to the rules. Police have made it known they will not let up on treating every threat as real to keep people and property safe, while the forensics teams piece together the story behind the recent email activity.
To put it in perspective, here is what gets put in motion when an alert like this goes out: – Get people out of the area, and do it in a hurry – In with the bomb squad to clear and clean up the zone – Let the other agencies know, no waiting around – Don’t go back to business as usual until you’ve been over everything
