Panic in Bengaluru as 20 private schools receive bomb threat emails

Panic gripped Bengaluru on July 18 after at least 20 private schools in various parts of the city received bomb threats via email. Several of these threats were declared hoaxes after extensive searches.

Email copies reviewed by The Hindu show the messages were sent at 7.31 a.m. from the ID “roadkill333@atomicmail.io.” The email read; “Hello. I am writing to let you know that I have placed several explosive devices (trinitrotoluene) within school classrooms. The explosives are skilfully hidden in black plastic bags.”

Bengaluru police teams, anti-sabotage teams, and canine squads were immediately deployed, and searches are ongoing. While some schools declared a holiday, others asked students to wait until the premises were searched. In several schools, the searches have concluded, and the threats were confirmed to be hoaxes.

C. Vamsi Krishna, Joint Commissioner (West), confirmed to The Hindu that around 15 schools received the threat emails. However, he noted that the exact number was not immediately clear, as schools continued to report such emails.

The threatening email included disturbing messages from the sender stating: “You all deserve this, you deserve to suffer just like me. I will erase the last one of you from this world. Not a single soul will survive. I will gladly laugh when I watch the news.”

“I truly hate my life,” the sender wrote.

“I was never, never truly helped. Psychiatrists, psychologists, no one has ever cared, and no one will ever care. You only care about medicating the helpless and clueless humans. Psychiatrists never tell you that those meds ruin your organs or that they cause disgusting weight gain,” the email stated.

The sender further claimed that people are “brainwashed into believing psychiatric medications can help but said he was living proof they don’t”.

The emails were sent to school administration IDs and, in several cases, to principals.

Police are filing complaints based on statements provided by the affected schools. As the same email was sent to multiple institutions, authorities are yet to decide whether to register individual FIRs or consolidate them into a single case.

In November 2023, around 70 schools in Bengaluru and its outskirts received similar bomb threat emails, which were later declared hoaxes.