An Indigo flight travelling from Muscat in Oman to India’s capital, New Delhi, with a layover at Kochi city was prompted to make an emergency landing at Nagpur airport in Maharashtra on Tuesday after receiving a bomb threat, according to Indian media.
The flight left Cochin for the Delhi airport carrying 157 passengers and six crew members at 9:31am IST (9:01am PKT). The Cochin International Airport Ltd. (CIAL) said that the threat was received on its official email address, Press India Trust reported.
As per ANI, a similar incident happened on Monday, where a Lufthansa flight LH752 scheduled to fly from Frankfurt in Germany to Hyderabad in India, was forced to return to Germany after a bomb threat was received through an email at Hyderabad airport at 6:01pm IST (5:31pm PKT) on June 15. A committee was formed to assess the threat as per the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
All passengers of the Indigo flight have been safely disembarked, according to DCP Nagpur, Lohit Matani.
An investigation is currently underway; however, preliminary checks have not found anything suspicious, officials confirmed.
After the bomb threat was received by the CIAL airport, a Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) was convened and the threat was declared as “specific”.
On June 13, an Air India flight AI 379 flying from Phuket to New Delhi with 156 passengers on board also received a bomb threat and was forced to land back in southern Thai island after making a wide loop around the Andaman Sea.
The incident followed the crash on an Air India flight in Ahmedabad on June 12, shortly after takeoff, killing more than 265 people.
