The Indian government is planning to introduce new legislation to combat a spate of hoax airline bomb threats which have caused travel chaos in the past week.
As of Tuesday afternoon, over 170 flights operated by Indian carriers had received bomb threats in a little over a week, including 80 since Monday night alone, according to The Economic Times newspaper in India.
All the threats have turned out to be fake but they have nevertheless caused widespread and costly disruption to airline schedules and inconvenienced thousands of passengers.
On Tuesday, nearly 50 flights were targeted including routes operated by Air India (13 flights), IndiGo (13), Akasa Air (12) and Vistara (11). On Monday night, three Jeddah-bound IndiGo flights were diverted to airports elsewhere in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
On Friday evening, a Vistara flight from New Delhi to London was diverted to Frankfurt, Germany, following a bomb threat made on X, formerly Twitter.
Elsewhere, Singapore and the United Kingdom have even scrambled fighter jets to escort planes that had received threats.
India taking hoaxes seriously, says minister
"Even though [the] bomb threats are hoaxes, [these] things cannot be taken non-seriously," said India's Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu on Monday, adding that "safety and security" were the priority and that airport checks had been increased.
He said the government is planning to pass new legislation that would put offenders on a no-fly list and amend the 1982 Civil Aviation Act so that they can be arrested and investigated without a court order.
So far, the hoaxers have largely gone untraced with police saying that they have only been able to make one arrest: a 17-year-old boy from India's eastern Chhattisgarh state detained last Wednesday for allegedly posting bomb threat messages on various airlines' social media profiles.
Police said the boy's motive was to implicate another person with whom he was involved in a business dispute.
India bomb threats linked to 'minors and pranksters'
"Recent hoax bomb threats have been traced to minors and pranksters," said Minister Naidu last week, saying they were related to "petty" things.
He has refused to comment on whether the threats have been emanating from a single source, saying an investigation into the "very sensitive situation" was still underway.
"We want to be able to take strict action against [the hoaxers]," he said.
The series of threats have come in the week that the Indian government has been celebrating the eighth anniversary of its "UDAN" Regional Connectivity Scheme, which it says has "redefined air travel by connecting remote regions and enhancing accessibility across the country."
