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Govt mulls change in SUASCA to punish hoax calls to aircraft on ground: Naidu

Oct 21, 2024 04:17 PM IST

Naidu said the government plans to take legislative actions to deal with instances of bomb threats to airlines

NEW DELHI: Union civil aviation minister K Rammohan Naidu on Monday said that the ministry is looking at an amendment to the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against Safety of Civil Aviation Act (SUASCA) to enable law enforcement agencies to invoke this law against people who make hoax bomb threats about aircraft at airports.

Union civil aviation K Rammohan Naidu (PTI)
Union civil aviation K Rammohan Naidu (PTI)

Currently, this stringent law is invoked against people who make hoax calls and endanger the safety of an aircraft when it is in the air, not on the ground.

“While it (SUASCA) takes care of the offences when the aircraft is in travel, in flight, if we want to address these kinds of threats that have been happening. We want to take strict action against people who are behind this when there is a fake or hoax threat that they are trying to do, we have to cover the act on the ground and the airport also. So we are trying to make an amendment. Our legal team has worked very thoroughly on this and we are coming up with an amendment,” Naidu told reporters.

Over the last week, more than 90 flights have received bomb threats, mostly through social media, to airlines. Naidu did not specify the punishment being proposed by the civil aviation ministry, saying the ministry was in consultations with other ministries on the issue. SUASCA currently stipulates life imprisonment for a hoax call about a plane in the air.

Naidu said the ministry was also in the process of amending the rules to put people who are caught for hoax calls on the no-fly list and that he had chaired a string of meetings on the topic over the last week.

“In the last week, I have chaired certain meetings with all the necessary stakeholders,” he said, adding that the aviation ministry was closely collaborating with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to address these security challenges.

The minister said the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) was also in discussions with the stakeholders including airlines.

Naidu assured that the situation was being handled with utmost seriousness. “Over the past week, eight flights were diverted due to these threats…. Even one plane gets diverted, it’s not what we want,” he said.

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