'Cyanide' recovered from Mangaluru airport bomb planter's bank locker

A police team has retrieved a box containing a powdery substance from the bank locker of the man who is suspected to have planted a bomb at the Mangaluru airport last week, police said on Sunday.

Aditya Rao, who was taken by the team on Saturday to the bank in Udupi besides a few other places he had frequented in the past, told the police that the powder was cyanide.

The probe team, led by ACP K U Belliappa, sent the box to Forensic Science Laboratory for examination, police said. The man, a native of Manipal, had the locker at Kunjibettu branch of Karnataka Bank in Udupi.

A family member had reportedly mentioned to the police that the 36-year old Rao had wanted to commit suicide by consuming poison.

Rao was also taken to Malpe near Udupi from where he had made the hoax call to the airport that a bomb had been placed in the IndiGo flight to Bengaluru on the same day he placed the bomb near the ticket counter of the Mangaluru airport.

He confessed to the police of having made the bomb threat call to the terminal manager, police said. After the call, he dumped the SIM card and left for Bengaluru where he surrendered to the police on January 22. Police, however, could not retrieve the SIM card.

Rao, under ten days police custody, will be taken later to Karkala where he worked in a restaurant, police said. A 'live' explosive device was found in an unattended bag near a ticket counter of the departure gate of the airport here on January 20, triggering a scare before it was defused at a nearby open ground.

Police had released a picture of a man captured on CCTV camera as the suspect who placed the bomb and Rao later surrendered.