Bomb hoax at 2 city hotels; ministers, guests, staff evacuated

Jaipur: Two high-end hotels in Jaipur received bomb threats via email on Saturday. Both turned out to be hoax.At Holiday Inn, around 10.30am, three Rajasthan ministers, including minister of state for home affairs Jawahar Singh Bedham, were attending a private event when the hotel received an email warning that a bomb would go off at 1.30pm. As police alerted the event organisers, Bedham used the microphone to evacuate people. All three ministers finally left the hotel, followed by staff and other guests.Nearly 150 domestic and foreign tourists were staying at the hotel at that time. Bomb disposal squads and the Anti-Terrorism Squad reached the hotel, cordoned off the area and launched room-by-room inspection. After nearly three hours of search, the threat was declared a hoax.The search wasn't even over when Raffles Hotel in Kukas, along the Jaipur-Delhi national highway, received a similar threat. ATS and bomb disposal teams searched the Kukas hotel too, while guests and staff were safely evacuated. The incident came just a day after similar threats were issued for two court complexes and the city's metro station in Mansarovar. An email, received at 4:49am on May 18 was addressed to court officials but remained unopened until Friday morning. When staff at the Family Court on Tonk Road checked their inboxes around 8:15am, they found the alarming message, sent by someone claiming to be a former Naxalite. The email warned of imminent blasts at the Tonk Road Family Court and the Metro Court in Bani Park. A separate mail, which also turned out to be hoax, was received for the Mansarovar metro station.Jaipur has seen a series of bomb threats in recent weeks. On May 8, 12 and 13, Sawai Man Singh Stadium received three threat emails. One of the messages was linked to a demand for justice for a rape survivor. On May 9, a threat was sent to Jaipur Metro following the success of "Operation Sindoor," warning that both a metro station and a train would be targeted. No explosives were found in any of these cases.Additional commissioner of police Kunwar Rashtradeep said that an investigation was currently underway into all the threat emails.