Kolkata went through two unconnected scares within a matter of hours on Friday, one on a Kolkata Metro rake and the other aboard a passenger aircraft at the city's airport, and in both cases officials moved quickly to evacuate people before it became clear there was nothing dangerous on board.
Smoke sends passengers scrambling off a Blue Line coach at Belgachia
The first alarm went up on the Kolkata Metro's Blue Line, where smoke was seen billowing out of a coach at around 4:10 pm on Friday. The train, which was travelling towards Dakshineswar, had come to a halt at Belgachia station at the time the smoke was spotted. A Metro spokesperson said the coach was cleared out the moment the smoke was noticed, with commuters guided onto the platform without delay. The spokesperson said the smoke drifted across parts of the platform area for a short while, but staff on duty brought the situation under control almost as quickly as it appeared. According to the Metro, there was no report of anyone being hurt, no casualties, and no stampede or panic among the commuters who were moved out. The coach that produced the smoke was later shifted to a car shed so that engineers could examine it and establish what went wrong, while the passengers who had been travelling in it were put on the next available train so their journey was not disrupted for long. Services on the corridor returned to normal once the affected rake had been pulled out of service.
A note about a bomb, hidden in a toilet-roll, grounds a Gorakhpur-bound flight
Hours later, a different kind of scare played out at Kolkata's airport, where a flight bound for Gorakhpur was held back after a threatening note was found on board just before it was due to take off. Airport officials said the note had been scrawled on a piece of tissue paper tucked inside a toilet paper roll in the aircraft's washroom, and that it referred to a bomb. A senior airport official said all the passengers were taken off the aircraft the moment the note was discovered. "Security personnel from CISF, along with the bomb disposal squad and sniffer dogs, searched the plane thoroughly," the official said. Teams combed through the cabin, the washrooms and the cargo hold, but the search turned up nothing suspicious, and no explosive material was found anywhere on the aircraft. Once the checks were completed and the plane was cleared, it was allowed to depart, taking off for Gorakhpur at around 8:45 pm that night, several hours after the note had first been found.
