Bengaluru, 5 March

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his deputy DK Shivakumar have received an email threatening to cause explosions at various targets of the State if they don't pay up $2.5 million (around Rs 207 crore), the Deputy Chief Minister said.

Shivakumar, also State Congress Chief, said on Tuesday he has forwarded the email to the police officers who are now on the job to trace the sender. “I and the Chief Minister Siddaramaiah received the mail three days ago. It is in my phone and I have sent it to the police for investigation,” he said.

According to him, the sender is Shahid Khan10786, who has also shared another email ID for future communication. The letter read, “Alert-1- You saw our movie trailer. If you don’t provide us 2.5 million USD we will cause large explosion on buses, trains, taxis, temples, hotels and public places throughout Karnataka.

“Alert-2 – We want to show you one more trailer. We will explode in the next one in the Ambari Utsav bus. After the blast in the bus we will raise our demand on social media and we will upload the screenshots of the mail sent to you also on the social media. We will tweet the next information about explosion on the social media.", it said.

Shivakumar said: “We don’t know whether it is bogus, fraud, true, false or blackmailer. We have sent it to our police officers. They are on the job.”

The mail comes close on the heels of the low-intensity blast at an eatery 'The Rameshwaram Cafe' in Brookefield area near Whitefield here on March one.