The Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum in Bengaluru, situated in the city centre, received a bomb threat via email on Friday, January 5, alongside the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium and the National Gallery of Modern Art. The email was only a one-liner which claimed that explosives were planted on the premises.
The police control room was immediately alerted and bomb squads, dog squads, and police teams conducted thorough searches of the three prominent locations throughout the afternoon. Following the checks, the police said that the threats were hoaxes and confirmed the absence of any suspicious objects.
According to the police, the threatening email was sent from the ID 'Morgue999lol,' purporting to be from the 'Terrorizers 111' terror organisation. Investigations are underway to trace the source of the emails, and three separate FIRs have been filed in Cubbon Park police, High Grounds police, and Vidhana Soudha police stations.
Similar hoax threat emails were sent to museums in other cities on January 5, including Kolkata, Goa and Ahmedabad. This incident comes just over a month after nearly 70 schools in and around Bengaluru received similar hoax bomb threat emails in December, causing widespread chaos in the region.