Jaipur/Chandigarh : A 24-year old youth whose hoax tweet about a bomb in a Jet Airways plane on an international flight triggered a scare and led to its emergency landing in Muscat surrendered on Friday before Jaipur police.
An HR executive with an MNC financial firm, Surin-der Pratap, whose twitter handle carried the tweet, was neither detained nor arrested by the Jaipur police since it said no case was registered against him in the city.
However, Pratap has been kept under surveillance till he is taken into custody by a Mumbai police team which is expected to reach there on Saturday. Hailing from Ludhiana in Punjab, Pratap is staying in a rented flat with seven others on the outskirts of Jaipur city.
A Dubai-bound Jet Airways flight from Mumbai with 61 passengers and crew had made an emergency landing at Muscat airport following a tweet about the presence of a bomb on board. The flight was later cleared for onward travel after the message turned out to be hoax.
The police said Pratap apparently posted the tweet for some publicity but when he was slammed by twitteratis he deleted it on Friday night and landed at the police station on Friday to express regret for his act.
Pratap hails from Uttar Pradesh. He claims to have “casually” posted the tweet from his account, which was created recently, and by the same name, without realising its repercussions.
Incidentally, Pratap had posted two tweets from his mobile: one was about a bomb on the flight and in the other he had claimed that he was involved in the Vyapam scam of Madhya Pradesh.
Preliminary investigation by Ludhiana Police suggested that Pratap “opened his twitter account four to five days ago”.
