For fun, hotel receptionist says he will blow up Red Fort, arrested

NEW DELHI Having accidentally dialled a wrong phone number, a 22-year-old man decided to have some fun. He told the person at the other end that he would be blowing up the Red Fort and a hotel in Connaught Place, sending Delhi police into a tizzy.

Police personnel from several police stations were deployed to search the “blast targets” for explosives and nabbing the caller. The call was finally declared a hoax and the alleged caller caught.

Employed at the front desk of a hotel in Paharganj, Mehfooz Raza used the hotel’s landline number to make the call. Little did he realise that he was live on a CCTV camera installed at the hotel’s lobby.With the threat call being recorded by the person at the other end, Raza was left with no chance of lying through the situation and has been arrested, said a senior police officer.The call had been received by Nitin Kumar Gupta, a 30-year-old resident of Rohini. Employed by an advertising firm, Gupta was at work on Saturday evening when he received a call at 7.09 pm.

“It was a 33-second-long call in which the man told me that he was calling from Kashmir and would blow up India’s Red Fort around 8.30 pm. He also said he had planted explosives at a hotel in Connaught Place and it would go off soon after,” Gupta told HT.

Immediately after the call was disconnected, Gupta dialled 100 and sought advice on how to proceed with his complaint. “I was immediately put in touch with senior officers who took my address. Seeing so many police personnel landing at my home, my parents panicked,” said Gupta. But Gupta was confident that there was not much to harass him about, as the police told him he had little to fear as they went about their job for the next three hours. “The call was recorded on my phone. I immediately provided the recording to the police. I had also called my office and my boss to apprise them of the situation,” said Gupta.