More than fifty schools in New Delhi received emails containing bomb threats this Wednesday, forcing the capital’s police to evacuate and inspect numerous educational centers and creating panic among students and parents. “The number of schools (that have received threats) is increasing, there are now more than fifty,” Deputy Police Commissioner Ranjit Singh told EFE, from the Sanskriti school in the capital. The source stated that security force teams are checking numerous schools.
The Deputy Commissioner of Police of the southeast of the capital city, Rohit Meena, stated in statements to the ANI agency that the security forces received information that an email had been sent alerting several schools around 4:15 in the morning ( 22.45 Tuesday GMT)
In the city of Ghaziabad, adjacent to New Delhi and part of the capital territory, the bomb threat caused panic despite parents’ almost certainty that it was a false announcement. “The first thing is safety. In practice these incidents always end up being lies, but it is always better to be safe than to have to be sorry. The school should close for today,” Nimesh Sharma, whose two children study at the DPS school, told EFE. Siddhartha Vihar.
Sharma was one of many parents who went to the school to pick up their children, after the school announced via WhatsApp that its students were safe despite the “rumour of bomb threat in New Delhi schools.”
It is not the first time that bomb threats arriving by letter or email have forced Indian authorities to evacuate schools.
Last December, dozens of schools in the southern city of Bengaluru had to be inspected by the Police after receiving a bomb warning also by email. In this same town, in April of last year, nine other schools were evicted due to similar threats.
India’s Home Ministry said the bomb threat “appears to be false” amid alarm among parents and students. “Some schools in New Delhi have received threatening emails this morning. The emails appear to be a hoax and there is no need to panic,” the Ministry said on the social network X.
The Minister of Education of the Government of New Delhi, Atishi Marlena Singh, noted in X that “at the moment nothing has been found” in the schools. “I have ordered the police to conduct a thorough search in the school premises, identify the culprits and ensure that there are no mistakes,” New Delhi Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena said in X, before assuring that the culprits behind threats “will not be delivered.”
