An Air India flight travelling to New Delhi was forced into an emergency landing a day after the Ahmedabad air disaster.
The flight from Phuket in Thailand to India’s capital received a bomb threat on Friday and was forced to made an emergency landing back at the airport on the Thai island.
Passengers were escorted from the plane, flight AI379, in line with emergency plans, an Airports of Thailand official said.
There were 156 passengers on the flight and the bomb threat was recieved on board the plane, it said in a statement.
The aircraft took off from Phuket airport for the Indian capital at 9.30 am on Friday, but made a wide loop around the Andaman Sea and landed back at the Thai island, according to flight tracker Flightradar24.
The incident occurred after a message with a bomb threat was found in one of the plane’s lavatories after takeoff, Phuket Airport general manager Monchai Tanode told a press conference,
“Police took suspects for questioning but could not clearly say who wrote the note,” he said.
Air India official Debasish Choudhury said there were initially three suspects and all had been cleared.
The incident came a day after an Air India flight departing for London crashed moments after take-off in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, killing all but one of the 241 people on board.
The casualties included 169 Indian, 53 British, one Canadian and seven Portuguese citizens, the airline said.
Indian civil aviation faced a crisis last year after what turned out to be hoax bomb threats forced emergency landings or cancellations of a number of flights.
Airlines and airports fielded nearly 1,000 hoax calls and messages in the first 10 months of 2024, about 10 times more than in the whole of the previous year.
