26 October,2009 11:23 AM IST | | Imran Gowhar
Abhishek Gupta, (25), a software engineer from the city, who feared he will be too late to board his Bangalore-bound GoAir flight G8201 in Delhi, tried to delay it with a bomb scare on Sunday, but only succeeded in landing behind bars.
Gupta was scheduled to arrive from Lucknow at Delhi by 6 am and then catch the flight at 8.45 am. However, the Gorakhnath Express he was travelling in got delayed. He then called the help desk of GoAir for assistance.
When the staff refused to oblige, Gupta reportedly asked them to put him on the next flight to Bangalore, but they refused. "Gupta desperately wanted to reach Bangalore. So he called the help desk again and reported a suspicious object on the plane. He thought by doing this, the flight would get delayed for some time and he would be able to reach the airport by then and board it," said a police officer.
Caught
Following the call, the GoAir flight was grounded and the 158 passengers and six crew on board were asked to disembark. The bomb disposal squads were pressed into service but nothing was found on the aircraft. The police said Gupta reached at around 9.30 a.m and asked for the boarding pass. "It aroused some suspicion.
Gupta was then cornered and questioned. He then confessed to causing the panic," said the police officer. The flight finally left Bangalore after a delay of four hours.
Gupta, who works for Infosys, was then arrested. When contacted, Infosys officials refused to comment on the incident, saying that they had not yet received any official communication about Gupta's arrest from the police.
Matthew Carney (23), an Australian flight attendant sparked a mid-air emergency in March this year, by leaving a bomb hoax note in the toilet of an Emirates flight from Dubai to London. The note said, 'Explosive material can be found in the FWD (forward cargo department). We have the Taliban to thank for this.u0094 Armed officers surrounded the plane when it landed at London's Gatwick airport. Investigations soon revealed that the alarm was a hoax and in May, Carney pleaded guilty of 'communicating information known or believed to be false with the intention of inducing a false belief that an object liable to explode or ignite was present in the cargo of a plane.u0094 He was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment in a British jail.
