The Hindu : Front Page : Man held in connection with e-mail threat

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Oct 30, 2006
ePaper

Front Page

Front Page

Man held in connection with e-mail threat

Staff Reporter

Thiruvananthapuram: The police, on Sunday, arrested a 26-year-old man for allegedly sending seditious e-mails threatening the lives of the President and the Prime Minister. He was produced before a Judicial First Class Magistrate in Kochi and remanded in judicial custody till November 10.

The accused, Akbar Raj, is a computer hardware instructor. So far, he has no proven links with any fundamentalist outfit. The police have ruled out any security threat to the Prime Minister when he visits Kerala on November 1.

The police said the suspect wanted to bring under "hostile media glare" a woman with whom he had been having a troubled relationship. The alleged aim was to spoil her chances of marriage. The menacing messages were e-mailed to over 30 high-ranking police officials from an Internet café in Kochi on October 26 afternoon. The sender had used a fictitious e-mail address and indicated the identity of the woman in the form of a cipher, expecting the code to be a giveaway. The postal index number (PIN) code of the woman's locality, the engineering college where she studied, the Internet protocol address of the software company she worked for and other personal details, including her date of birth, education and marital status, were revealed when investigators decoded the cipher.

The police traced the woman, a software engineer, and learned that she had filed police complaints against Akbar on the charge of harassing her. The police learned that the woman had met Akbar on the Internet as a "chat friend." They even contemplated marriage, but the relationship turned sour later, the police said.

Last month, the Kochi police warned Akbar for allegedly sending a "mock" letter bomb to his own address by portraying the woman as the sender. The police now suspect that Akbar, posing as a woman activist of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India, sent a different set of threatening e-mails, including one to the President's website, on October 24.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Front Page