Passport office gets third hoax bomb threat in five months

2 min readPuneJul 16, 2026 01:30 AM IST

First email was received on February 26 and second on March 20, officials said.

THE REGIONAL Passport Office on Baner-Pashan Link Road in Pune received its third hoax bomb threat in five months on Wednesday, as similar threatening emails were sent to multiple passport and post offices across the country. Police said the emails, which warned of explosions, were sent using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to mask the sender’s IP address, making it difficult to trace the source, like the earlier emails.

“The email, received on Wednesday morning, threatened that a ‘cyanide bomb blast’ would be triggered at a specified time. This is the third such email we have received since February 26. Each has been sent from a different email address and contains random, cryptic messages. The emails follow a similar pattern and appear to be nothing more than acts of mischief. However, as a law enforcement agency, we are duty-bound to treat every threat seriously and carry out exhaustive searches to rule out any risk,” the officer said, adding that nothing suspicious was found in the search at the passport office.

First email was received on February 26 and second on March 20, officials said. “The threatening emails received by passport and post offices in Surat, Dhanbad and other parts of the country on Wednesday appear to follow a similar pattern. Like the previous series of hoax threats, these emails were also sent using a VPN to mask the sender’s IP address, making it difficult to trace the origin. We are coordinating with other agencies and are probing the source,” the officer said.