Seventy-nine flights operated by Indian carriers received bomb threats between Monday night and Tuesday, India Today reported. During this period, 23 flights from IndiGo, 23 from Air India, 21 from Vistara and 12 from Akasa received such threats.
This took the total number of bomb threats received by airlines to 169 since October 14.
The 23 IndiGo flights received threats in two different posts on the social media platform X at 11.40 pm on Monday and 4 pm on Tuesday, The Hindu reported.
“All the threats were declared non-specific and the flights allowed to continue to destination,” the newspaper quoted an unidentified Central Industrial Security Force official as saying.
Three of these IndiGo aircraft that were headed to Jeddah were diverted. While flight 6E 77, flying from Bengaluru to Jeddah, was redirected to Doha, flight 6E 65 from Kozhikode to Jeddah had to land in Riyadh. Flight 6E 63 from Delhi to Jeddah was diverted to Medina, according to The Hindu.
A Vistara spokesperson said that the “security threats” were received by the airline on social media. “We immediately alerted the relevant authorities and are following all security procedures as directed by them,” the spokesperson added.
On Monday, Union Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Kinjarapu Naidu said that the Centre was considering legislative action to include persons found guilty of making hoax threats to flights on the no-fly list.
“We have come to the conclusion that there are two areas that we can explore,” Naidu said. “One is an amendment in the Aircraft Security Rules…Once we catch hold of the perpetrator who is behind this [hoax threat], we want to put them in the no-fly list.”
“The second action is the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against Safety of Civil Aviation Act,” Naidu added. “This is a 1982 law that deals with aspects of security in flights. It takes care of some offences, but we have to amend the law to make other offences of the kind we are dealing with cognisable.”
A high-level meeting was also held by the Ministry of Home Affairs on Monday with the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security and the Central Industrial Security Force, which is responsible for security at airports.
More than a dozen first information reports have been registered by the Mumbai Police and the Delhi Police in connection with the recent threats to flights.
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