A 30-year-old man was arrested from Ahmedabad in Gujarat on Thursday for creating 300 email IDs and giving access to a man in Bangladesh who used them to send hoax bomb threats to multiple schools across Gurugram, Delhi, Chandigarh, and Karnal on January 28, police said on Friday.
Police identified the suspect as Saurabh Vishwas alias Michael, who hails from Khulna, Bangladesh. Police said the suspect entered India nine years ago, allegedly created a forged Aadhaar card along with other documents registered to an address at Sripalli Bazaar in Govindpalli, West Bengal.
Priyanshu Dewan, assistant commissioner of police (cybercrime), said Vishwas was a part of a Facebook and a WhatsApp group from October 2024, where he got in touch with another suspect, Mamunoor Rashid, also from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
“Last year, Rashid promised to pay Vishwas in USDT, a form of cryptocurrency, if he provided email addresses of people,” said Dewan. Dewan added that during a one-day police remand for interrogation, it surfaced that the motive for these threat mails was to trigger panic.
ACP Dewan said that Vishwas created at least 300 email addresses over a period of time and provided them to Rashid, receiving around USDT250—approximately ₹23,400—last year.
Police said three of these email addresses were used to send hoax bomb threat emails to schools in different parts of the country. The IP address from where the emails were sent was traced to the US and all these emails were linked to a common email used for recovery, which was of Vishwas’s relative in Bangladesh.
According to investigators, the same sets of emails, which were also used to send the threats to schools in Gurugram, Delhi, Karnal, and Chandigarh on January 28, were used to send threat emails to schools in Gujarat and Bihar. The email asked Haryana chief minister Nayab Singh Saini to support the Khalistan referendum to end the state’s water dispute with Punjab.
Vishwas had studied till Class 12 and had been working as a freelancer for the last five years in West Bengal and Gujarat, police said.
Police said an FIR was registered against Vishwas under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the IT Act at the Cybercrime police station (south) on January 28.