The Hindu : Front Page : How police cracked hoax call case

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Sep 08, 2006

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How police cracked hoax call case

Karthik Subramanian
and L. Srikrishna

A closed-circuit camera expedited the arrest of the caller

R. Perinbaraj

CHENNAI: A software that monitors calls made to the emergency number `100' helped the police zero in on the person who was behind the hoax call leading to a two-hour delay of the President's flight at the Chennai airport on Monday night. It was also sheer luck that a closed-circuit camera was right in front of the public telephone booth from where the call was made. It expedited the arrest of the youth.

Officers of the Cyber Crime Cell, who investigated the case, said an online monitoring system recorded all calls made to the police control room. The software creates a log of telephone numbers where distress calls are received.

If the caller dials from a BSNL landline, the software records the number. The police then verify the number in the database for the caller's identity. However, if the caller dials from a private telecom network that uses the Wireless in Local Loop technology, as was the case on Monday night, the system logs the number `800'. In such cases, the police get back to the private operators for details.

On Monday, when R. Perinbaraj, an employee of a major jewellery showroom on Usman Road, called `100' around 10.30 p.m., his conversation was recorded at the police control room. Since he called from a public phone booth of Tata Indicom, the software recorded `800.'

After the investigation into the hoax call began, the police sent out a request to all private operators to get details about emergency calls from their networks in the time window between 10.15 p.m. and 10.45 p.m. Tata Indicom Network provided them with three telephone numbers.

Of the three numbers, two were of public phone booths and the third one was of a residence.

The police immediately turned their focus to the public phone booths in T.Nagar and Velachery. Since the phone booth on Usman Road came under the coverage of a closed-circuit camera, installed by the jewellery shop, the police acquired the tapes for Monday night. Here again they were lucky, because the shop maintained footage on a 24-hour-loop. The investigators got the tape just hours before it was overwritten. During investigation, other employees of the jewellery shop told the police that Perinbaraj had bragged about his `prank call.'

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