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Two e-mail threats received by CMO on Aug. 20

CUTTACK: The Chief Minister’s office had actually received two mysterious e-mails on August 20 threatening to blow up the Assembly building and not one as reported earlier.

The State Crime Branch IG B K Sharma, who successfully supervised the investigations into it, disclosed this on Friday.

"In fact two e-mails were sent to Chief Minister’s mail ID cmo@ori.nic.in on that day within a gap of 10 minutes and both the mails had contained the same message from the same sender who identified himself as one Gagan Patnaik. Only difference was that the first one was sent through hotmail service while the second one was through gmail service," Sharma said.

But the one-year-old cyber police station of the State took only three days to solve the mysterious e-mail message.

The only Cyber police station of the State that is functioning from the Crime Branch office here accomplished the mission when it retrieved the BSNL subscriber identification number slip of the sender of the e-mail from the regional office of a Rourkela-based Ferro Alloys Company at Bhubaneswar on Thursday.

"We have detained three employees of the Mahavir Ferro Alloys Company, including its managing director Satyaranjan Singh and a senior liaison officer Sachhinanda Lenka for questioning. Two CPUs, a laptop and several CDs have been seized from their office," Sharma said. “Although, the detained persons deny their involvement, we are sure the "prank mail" was sent from their computers and we believe Lenka who frequents to the Secretariat is the mastermind behind it,” he confides.

Panic struck when the Chief Minister’s office on August 20 received the e-mail which had the message in Hindi written in English script said that all preparations were complete to blow up the Assembly building within a fortnight. The case was handed over to the cyber police station, which after registering a case began investigations into it on August 27.

Explaining the modus operandi of their investigations, Sharma said after getting the Chief Minister’s Internet protocol number we thoroughly checked all the pathways.

"We finally came to know that the mail was sent through BSNL gateway. Then we searched all the e-mail sources and destination points of all the BSNL subscribers to track the sender’s IP number," Sharma said. The senders IP number, having 10 digits matched with the IP number of one of the users of the computers seized from the Mahavir Ferro Alloys office, the IG said.

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