New Delhi: A day after the national Capital was shaken up by emails of bomb threats sent to over 250 schools in Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR), Delhi Police sought assistance from Russia to track the likely suspect.
The National Central Bureau (NCB) in Moscow has been asked to provide details of the person who created the email account with the country domain (.ru), from where the hoax bomb threats were sent.
Police said the suspect created an email ID ‘sawariim@mail.ru’ after registering with a private email service provider that offered other facilities and used a virtual private network (VPN) to shroud identity.
That email address was used to send bomb threat messages to all the schools early on Wednesday morning.
The email, of 281 words, stated that there are “many explosive devices in the school”.
Mail.ru is an email service provided by Russian company VK, similar to Gmail and Outlook which provided by Google and Microsoft, respectively.
VPNs allow users to mask their IP addresses online.
“We have collected details of the emails from all the schools and examined them. All emails were sent by the same origin one by one to the schools. No other email IDs were used. All information has been sent to NCB Russia through Interpol. We have asked for details of the registrant such as name, address contact details, alternate email IDs, and complete ID Logs. We are awaiting their reply,” a senior police officer said.
Panic gripped Delhi and NCR on Wednesday as news about bomb threats spread through the media.
Delhi Police’s special cell registered a case of criminal conspiracy and criminal intimidation under relevant sections of IPC and Information Technology (IT) Act.
Several teams of special cell’s counterintelligence unit (CIU) and Intelligence Fusion Strategic Operations (IFSO) are probing the matter.
As per initial findings, the country domain (.ru) of the email ID used to send the bomb threats was also used for a similar email sent to a Delhi private school last year.
Police suspect “a deeper conspiracy” behind the mass threat emails.
