Coimbatore airport put on high alert
Airports in Tamil Nadu and Kerala were put on high alert today following a phone call that a bomb has been placed in Doha-Chennai Qatar Airways flight.Airport sources here said that an anonymous caller rang up a police station at Mangalore to say that 'a human bomb' travelling in the Doha-Chennai-Qatar Airways flight would blow up after the flight landed here.The Karnataka DGP, who was informed about the call, alerted his Tamil Nadu counterpart, D Mukherjee.Bomb disposal squads, along with sniffer dogs, frisked all 177 people on board the Qatar Airways plane and combed the aircraft for nearly two hours and found no explosives.Following the call, security was beefed up at Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruchirapalli airports in Tamil Nadu and at all the three international airports in adjacent Kerala following the phone call.Security personnel at Thiruvanthanpuram, Kochi and Kozhikode airports thoroughly searched some flights which arrived from the Gulf and found no explosive in them, airport sources said.The luggage of passengers were also checked before the flights were allowed to take off.The flights searched were Doha-Thiruvanthapuram-Kozhikode service of Air India Express and Qatar Airways' Doha-Thiruvananthapuram-Doha, airport sources said.The checks, however, did not cause inordinate delay in the departure of the flights, the sources said.
