Woman held for threatening disputed shrine with anonymous calls

The mystery behind a bomb threat to the disputed shrine atop Bababudangiri hills in Chickmagalur in Karnataka has been cracked with the arrest of a woman.

The police arrested a woman by name Tabassum alias Deepa for making anonymous calls to the intelligence department stating that armed militants would blow up the cave shrine.

Soon after receiving the bomb threat, the Chickmagalur police went into a tizzy and beefed up security at the controversial shrine by deploying additional personnel. Check-posts had come up almost instantaneously on all the routes leading to the Bababundagiri shrine.

But, when the Additional Superintendent of Chickmagalur police Phaneendra Singh received a similar call on his mobile a couple of days ago from a woman posing as a CBI officer, the call was traced to a telephone booth in Chickmagalur town. No sooner had a woman constable been posted at the booth to apprehend the caller than a stout woman arrived and attempted to make a call. The plainclothes policemen, who were lying in wait near the booth, immediately apprehended the caller.

During police interrogation, the woman confessed to making the threatening call, posing as a CBI officer. She revealed that she was the daughter of T R Subhashchandra Arora and Sudhadevi of Bangalore. After her education in Chickmagalur, she completed her Masters Degree in Computer Applications (MCA). Later, she fell in love with one Mohammed Sheikh of Aurangabad and converted to Islam.

But, she separated from Mohammed Sheikh and moved to Bangalore, where she married a shop owner in Shivajinagar area Mohammed Yousuf Shariff. Soon, Tabassum left Bangalore when her husband’s financial condition worsened. She arrived in Chickmagalur last month in the hope of contacting her old friends, but in vain.

Tabassum confessed to the police that she had posed as a CBI officer and telephoned the intelligence department as well as the Additional Superintendent of police and also wrote to the Deputy Superintendent of Police criticizing them for the inadequate security to the disputed cave shrine atop Bababudangiri hills.

Tabassum, who is learnt to be pregnant, was produced before the court on Thursday and remanded to judicial custody till June 1. The police, however, carried out a thorough search of the cave shrine atop the hills, but did not find any explosives.