The Intelligence Bureau had called the entire episode a 'figment of imagination' of a young girl who first raised the alarm.
Despite Intelligence Bureau terming Uran alert a prank, Maharashtra Home department is still conducting searches across the state and has also put adjacent states on alert as the internal departmental report doesn't hint at any possible prank.
On September 22, Maharashtra was put on high alert after students of Uran Education Society's school spotted some suspicious men with arms in the early hours of the day and raised an alarm. However, the report filed by the Intelligence Bureau with the Ministry of Home Affairs called the entire episode a "figment of imagination" of a young girl who first raised the alarm.
Sources with the state Home department said that their internal report does not specify any such possibility; instead, the story narrated by the young girl was only reported to the police by the school headmistress after another student corroborated it.
As per the report, the girl student, aged 14, who first raised the alarm, saw four armed men in black Pathan suit at around 7 am. She immediately told her teacher who informed the headmistress. As a precaution, the headmistress announced it at the school assembly, following which a boy from the same class also reported seeing one such man from the window of his classroom which is on the third floor of the school, at around 6:45 am the same day.
Soon after the headmistress alerted the police, the television channel started flashing the news. "We fear that the suspects, on learning it, mingled with the crowd and gave police the slip. However, the security forces are still on alert and are continuing with the search operations. We fear that the suspects might have made their way to neighbouring Goa, Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh, and we have alerted the police departments there as well," said a senior officer on condition of anonymity.
The alert came four days after the terror attack in Uri in which 18 soldiers were killed. The fishing town of Uran is located across the eastern water front of the financial capital. Coastal security has been a top priority after the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in which multiple locations in the city were targeted by Pakistani terrorists who landed using the sea route. Besides local police, marine commandos (MARCOS) of the Indian Navy were also deployed on the Karanja naval base on account of the terror alert.
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