Museum, planetarium, art gallery in Bengaluru get hoax bomb threat emails

A museum, an art gallery and the planetarium in the city received bomb threat emails on Friday morning, which proved to be a hoax after the police checked all three premises. Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, all situated a short distance away from the administrative nerve centre of the State, the Vidhana Soudha, received a bomb threat in an email on Friday.

A museum, an art gallery and the planetarium in the city received bomb threat emails on Friday morning, which proved to be a hoax after the police checked all three premises. Similar hoax threat emails were sent to museums in other cities of the country, at least to museums in Kolkata and Ahmedabad. 

These hoax threat emails came just over a month after nearly 70 schools in and around the city got similar hoax bomb threat emails on December 1, throwing the entire city into chaos.

Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, all situated a short distance away from the administrative nerve centre of the State, the Vidhana Soudha, received a bomb threat in an email on Friday. The email was a one-liner which only said there were explosives planted on the premises, unlike the threat emails to schools, sources in the city police said. The police pressed dog squads and bomb disposal squads into action and determined the threats were a hoax. 

Media reports suggest similar hoax threat emails were sent to museums in Otago, New Zealand, in the last 24 hours. Similar emails were sent to museums in Connecticut, U.S., in October 2023.  

Police Commissioner B. Dayananda said the modus operandi of the senders of these emails seems to be similar to that of those who sent the emalis to schools in December and the city police were probing both cases. 

However, the probe into the school hoax bomb threat emails case has hit a dead-end with the private domain used to send the emails directing the city police to a Proton virtual private network (VPN) which the email sender has used. Since Proton VPN has a no logs policy, the probe has hit a dead end.