Threat to Prime Minister's flight tied to cop's phone?

Chennai: Probe into three bomb threat calls - claiming that there would be an explosion in the Prime Minister's aircraft - received at the Pallavaram police station on Monday-shows that they originated from a public telephone booth and two mobile phones.

Mystery surrounds the call from one of the cell phone numbers, which allegedly belongs to a police constable attached to the Pallavaram police station. "We received three consecutive bomb threat calls to the Prime Minister's plane around 1.15 pm on Monday," Pallavaram Inspector Venkat Kumar told Express.

A special team picked up R Ravichandran (45), who works in a lathe workshop, and his son R Jayakumar (22), a bio-technology graduate, from their house on Trunk Road, Poonamalle, around midnight, after one of the SIM cards showed that it had been registered under the duo's previous residential address.

In a curious twist, relatives of the father-son duo claimed that the cell phone was sold to a woman neighbour, S Indirani (58), only last week. A resident of Kolathur, Indirani owned a house in Poonamalle and had rented it out.

Ravichandran's brother-in-law Babu told Express that his mother Navaneetham, a flower seller, bought a cell phone in November last. "She asked my brother-in-law to get her a SIM," he said. "He was then staying in Royapuram and using his ration card as ID proof, got a SIM card. After his mother died, Babu said he started using the phone until three months ago, when he dropped it in water. Last week, his son Ajit Kumar (15), who studies in Class X in a local school, sold the SIM card to Indirani. "After the sale, I never touched it again," Ajit said.

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Indrani told this reporter that she purchased the SIM from the boy for 500 and fixed it in a phone she already owned. She said her eldest son S Kumar (41), who worked as "Grade 1 constable, handled the cell phone.

Denying that there was any constable by that name attached to his station, the inspector said: "Probably, he belongs to Home Guard or some other wing." He added that Rahim of Manali had also been picked up. Relatives of Ravichandran and Jayakumar expressed concern whether the father-son duo was being made scapegoat in the issue.

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