Passengers on an Indigo flight from Delhi to Varanasi were evacuated on Tuesday morning following a bomb scare.
There were 176 passengers on the plane bound for the Hindu holy city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
They were quickly deboarded after a pilot found a threat written on a piece of paper in the lavatory at around 5.30am, just as the flight was preparing to take off.
It read: “Bomb blast @ 30 minutes.”
“There was news of a bomb on the flight going from Delhi to Varanasi at 5.35am today. Quick Response Teams arrived at the spot,” a Delhi fire services spokesperson told The New Indian Express.
A Delhi airport spokesperson said all passengers were taken off safely. “The flight is undergoing a detailed inspection,” the spokesperson added. “All passengers were evacuated through the emergency exits without incident.”
The aircraft was moved to an isolated area where security agency personnel conducted a search operation, Indigo said in a statement.
“The flight is currently undergoing inspection,” the airline said. “Post completion of all security checks, the aircraft will be positioned back in the terminal area.”
This is the second such incident this month.
A tissue paper with the word “bomb” written on it was found in the lavatory of an Air India flight at Delhi airport earlier this month. That too turned out to be a hoax.
Several schools and hospitals in the national capital have recently received threatening emails claiming the presence of explosives on their premises. Investigators have found them all to be false alarms.
In February last year, an Indian army personnel was booked for allegedly making a hoax bomb call to police after he missed his second flight for the day.