Suspect in Mangaluru airport bomb case remanded to police

The man, who is suspected to have planted a bomb at the airport here, was on Thursday produced before a city court, which remanded him to 10 days police custody.

A day after Aditya Rao surrendered before the police in Bengaluru, he was produced before the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court Judge Kishore Kumar, who allowed the plea of the police seeking his custody for further investigation.

A heavy posse of police personnel was deployed in the court premises when the suspect was produced.

Rao was brought to the city on Wednesday night by a police team, after a medical check-up in the state capital.

He had surrendered before the police at the DGP office in Bengaluru early on Wednesday and confessed to having planted the bomb.

Earlier, Mangaluru police Commissioner P S Harsha said Rao had prepared in advance a definite plan before planting the IED in the airport premises.

He told reporters here that during questioning, the suspect revealed that he had ordered the materials online for making the bomb and got the parcels delivered at the hotel where he worked.

Though a few of the staff there raised doubts about the parcel, he gave them convincing answers in different ways, Harsha added.

Rao, an MBA graduate had been frustrated at not getting the recognition he deserved and took up various jobs.

He applied for the job of security guard at Bengaluru airport, which was denied to him.

Frustrated over this, he collected information about the duties of various staff at the airport and made a hoax bomb call to the airport in Bengaluru in 2018, resulting in disruption of several flights.

He spent nearly a year at the Chikkaballapur prision facing three cases including a hoax call to a railway station in Bengaluru.

A 'live' explosive device was found in an unattended bag near a ticket counter of the departure gate of the airport here on Monday and later defused at a nearby open ground.