Mumbai police in a tizzy with 48 ‘fake’ calls during Christmas weekend

Last Thursday evening, the Mumbai police announced at a hurriedly called press conference that they have received intelligence inputs about four terrorists having sneaked into the city to spread terror during Christmas and New Year. The police said that they have thrown a heavy security blanket across the city and appealed to the citizens to alert the police even if the slightest suspicious activity is noticed.

Exactly 48 hours later on Christmas night, a call — the first of the many such calls — came on the 100 number and told the police that there was a bomb planted in the Big Bazaar outlet in Kurla.

The entire police machinery went into a tizzy, police teams including the bomb squads fanned out in Kurla only to realise that there is no Big Bazaar outlet in Kurla.

While this was happening another call came which said that several bombs were planted across the city at various locations including malls, railway stations, shops and establishments. The entire police set up, which has to attend to every call and verify the caller’s claims, was sent into a tail-spin by as many as 48 calls from 10pm on Saturday till 2pm on Sunday.

“The caller claimed that there were bombs planted in malls and shopping establishments,” a senior officer said.

During one of the calls, the caller told the police that he had kidnapped a 15-year-old girl from Mulund and would be taking her to Thane and murdering her. “The caller even changed his voice and spoke like a young girl screaming for help,” the officer said.

However, it later transpired that all the calls were fake. Following this, the police started investigations to find out the source of the calls. They traced the calls to Panvel and with the help of the Navi Mumbai police arrested two people — Sobeshwar Mochi alias Kallu, 15 and Niranjankumar Singh, 34 from a construction site in Panvel.

“They had used a cell phone to make the calls and once it was traced to Panvel, local police were alerted who then nabbed them from the spot,” Navi Mumbai police commissioner Ahmed Javed said.