A man who made repeated hoax calls to LuLu mall at Edappally and demanded Rs.75 lakh ransom for not setting off a bomb was arrested by the city police.
Manoj Xavier, 39, of Kurisingal House, Vypeen, was arrested from his rented house in Kadavanthra on Thursday evening.
He allegedly made three phone calls to the customer care centre of the mall on August 22 claiming that three bombs had been placed at the mall and that he would set them off if the mall owners failed to pay a ransom. Police revealed that the accused had made several calls to mall officials every day since then, even on the day of his arrest.
Manoj was arrested for armed robbery at a Kottayam jewellery shop in 2011. He, along with an accomplice, allegedly fired a gun in the shop and stole gold jewellery weighing about 7 kg in broad daylight. City police commissioner K.G. James said the accused was released on bail two-and-a-half years ago and was running an IT company in Kochi.
He allegedly obtained a SIM card a month ago using a forged identity card from a shop near DH ground and bought two second-hand phones from a store at Kaloor.
He used the phone only to make the hoax calls and removed the battery soon after the calls were made, making it difficult for the police to track him.
“Tripunithura sub-inspector P.R. Santhosh was able to recognise his voice that had a distinct accent and his good English diction from the Kottayam theft case as he had worked there before. This helped us narrow down the list of suspects,” Thrikkakara assistant commissioner Xavier Sebastian said.
Manoj, who also runs a poultry farm in Palakkad, allegedly asked mall officials to bring the ransom amount at a spot on the route from Thrissur to Palakkad.
He then kept changing the rendezvous points many times to different locations on the route between Kochi and Palakkad. Fearing that a police team was tailing the ransom money, he avoided collecting the money at each point, police said. They noted the numbers of vehicles moving along the route and used the data to nab the accused.
