A man who claimed to have planted a bomb at the Mangaluru airport surrendered yesterday, police said.
Aditya Rao, a jobless mechanical engineer, was arrested when he walked into the Karnataka Director General of Police (DGP) office in Bengaluru.
“Rao is said to be a depressed mechanical engineer and out of job. A couple of criminal cases were registered against him and he is on bail after two months in the Chikkaballapura district jail for allegedly making a hoax bomb call last year to Bengaluru international airport,” in Devanahalli, about 40km north of Bengaluru, a police official said.
Mangaluru Police Commissioner P S Harsha tweeted that a special investigation team from the coastal city would reach Bengaluru to take him to Mangaluru for investigation.
“Rao was taken to a hospital for a check-up and will be produced in a local court for his transit custody and interrogation by the Mangaluru police,” the Bengaluru official said.
Karnataka Home Minister Basavraj Bommai told reporters that the suspect was arrested after he surrendered to state DGP.
“The suspect seems to have admitted to leaving a bag containing some bomb-making material at the outside counter of an airline (IndiGo) office in the Mangaluru airport,” Bommai said.
According to preliminary investigation, Rao, a native of Udupi in the state’s coastal area, travelled to Bengaluru from Mangaluru in a lorry overnight and decided to surrender before the police.
The police questioned the driver of an auto-rickshaw in which Rao was seen leaving the airport. That led the police to a hotel where Rao left some bomb-making material like white powder in the room he was staying.
“Rao told the police that he was employed in the billing section of the hotel as he could not get a better job,” the official added.
Panic gripped Mangaluru airport on Monday evening when the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) found a black backpack abandoned at the airline’s check-in counter.
The bag was taken to an isolated place and detonated by a special bomb detection squad.
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