REPORT: ALOK SEMWAL
Uttarakhand woke up to a deeply unsettling morning on Tuesday. At 7:11 AM, the District Judges of Tehri and Nainital opened their official emails to find a chilling message — bombs had allegedly been planted inside their court premises, and the sender was giving them until 11:15 AM before, as the email put it, everything would be reduced to rubble.
What made this threat different from a routine hoax call was the language used. The person behind the email claimed to be connected to Pakistan’s spy agency ISI and the LTTE — the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. As if that were not enough, the message specifically mentioned a fidayeen strike, a human bomb attack.
Courts that once hummed with the routine noise of hearings and legal arguments were suddenly emptied out. Judges, lawyers, clerks, and ordinary people who had come to seek justice — everyone was rushed out. Bomb disposal teams moved in, working their way through parking areas, staircases, corridors and every dark corner they could find. Dog squads swept the premises inch by inch.
But here is the thing — nobody in Uttarakhand was hearing about this for the first time. The very day before, four courts had received near-identical threats. Nainital, Uttarkashi, Ramnagar, Haldwani — all targeted within the same twenty-four hour window. By Tuesday, the count had climbed to six courthouses across the state.
The timing has not gone unnoticed. Bar Association elections are currently being held across every district in Uttarakhand. Whether these threats are someone’s crude attempt to throw those elections into chaos, or whether something far more dangerous is brewing beneath the surface — that is the question keeping investigators up at night.
For now, police are chasing every digital trail the emails may have left behind. Security at all court premises has been stepped up significantly. The search is on — both for answers and for whoever is behind this.
