Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters in Chennai's Teynampet, received a bomb hoax on Thursday evening following which a bomb detection squad conducted a search of premises. The Chennai city police reportedly received a call shortly after 8 pm which 'alerted' them to a bomb at the party office. A team of Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS) of the city police and a sniffer dog unit arrived on scene to comb through the area. This later turned out to be a hoax.
Speaking to TNM on Thursday evening, staff members at the party office said that they were safe and had been told that an investigation is on regarding who placed the call. "The police are present at Arivalayam and conducted a thorough search. We are all safe. They suspected a bomb hoax and confirmed it after searching the premises," he said.
According to one report in the Hindustan Times, the caller reportedly conversed with the police in Hindi. An inquiry officer told the newspaper that the caller dialled the control room of the Chennai city police and warned regarding the presence of a bomb that had reportedly been planted at the office located in the heart of the city.
While DMK chief MK Stalin is known to frequent the party office in the evenings, on Friday, he was in Mumbai, attending Shiv Sena Chief Uddhav Thackeray’s ceremony as he was being sworn in as Chief Minister of Maharashtra.
Unconfirmed reports of a bomb threat at the Meenakshi Amman temple in Madurai were also doing the rounds yesterday. However, the Times of India reports police officials as saying that they had undertaken a security review of the site. Madurai city police commissioner Davidson Devasirvatham told the newspaper that it was a regular activity to review the security of the temple and no special alert from intelligence agencies had been received.