Suspect in Mangaluru airport bomb case surrenders

A mentally disturbed man with a penchant for revenge seems to be the mysterious person who planted a ‘bomb’ at the Mangaluru International Airport. Adithya Rao, a resident of the educational hub of Manipal, surrendered to police here on Wednesday.

Rao calmly walked into the office of the DG & IGP here in the early hours and emotionlessly said he had planted the bomb. He was immediately taken into custody and shifted to Halsoor Gate police station for questioning.

What Rao placed at the Mangaluru Airport was not a bomb but a very low-intensity improvised explosive device (IED), police officials were quoted citing observations of the bomb detection and disposal squad that defused it successfully.

“The sand bags placed around the area where the controlled explosion was triggered did not get damaged. Going by this, it can be concluded that it was a low-intensity IED,” a police officer said.

Meanwhile, sources said Adithya Rao (36), is an engineering graduate and has an MBA to his credit. But he has a strange mind. He was earlier arrested for making hoax bomb call in 2018 at Bengaluru International Airport.

That was an act of revenge, according to interrogation details. Rao had applied for job as security guard at Bengaluru international airport but had failed to provide certain documents. Because of the absence of these documents, a job was denied to him. As an act of vengeance for denying job to him, he had called Bengaluru airport on August 30, 2018 to inform them that he had planted bombs in the aircraft and the parking lot of the airport.