A 56-year-old man was arrested on Thursday, November 12, 2026, for issuing a hoax hijack threat on a Mumbai-bound Air India flight departing from Kolkata's Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport on Wednesday.
The incident occurred on flight AI 2772 when a handwritten threat note was discovered in the aircraft's washroom minutes before takeoff. In response, all 105 passengers were off-boarded, and the plane was moved to an isolation bay. A joint search operation by the local police and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) found no suspicious items on board.
Police identified the suspect, Partha Pratim Nandi, by matching handwriting samples and a rusty button imprint found on the note to his wallet. Inspector Prabhakar Adhikari of the airport police station stated that Nandi confessed to writing the message to force the cancellation of the flight.
According to investigators, Nandi was traveling to Mumbai to catch a connecting flight to South Africa for a new job. However, as both he and his wife have been battling cancer, he did not want to leave her. The hoax resulted in a seven-hour delay, with the flight eventually departing at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
