A death threat received through an email by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan from a purported terror outfit ID has prompted the Mumbai Police to beef up the security around him and launch an investigation through its Cyber Crime Investigation Cell (CCIC) into the origin of the e-mail.
Confirming the development, Deputy Commissioner of Police and Mumbai police spokesperson Dhananjay Kulkarni told The Pioneer here on Thursdaym, “The Cyber Crime Investigation Cell is trying to trace the origin of the email and ascertain the identity of the sender. Simultaneously, in view of the security threat faced by him, we are reviewing and enhancing the security of the RBI Governor”.
Kulkarni said that the Mumbai police had requisitioned the help of Google Inc to trace the details of the log-in ID used in threat email sent to the RBI Governor on his office mail nearly four weeks ago. Informed official sources said that the Mumbai police received a request from the RBI three weeks ago for tracing the origin of the threat email sent from an email ID: isis583847@gmail.com, allegedly belonging to the terrorist outfit Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The email sender said that he had been given a contract to eliminate Rajan, but if the RBI Governor paid more money than the contract amount promised to him, he could re-consider carrying out the threat. The sender, however, did not specify the amount of money that he had been promised and how much more he wanted to re-consider the contract.
“We have forwarded the mail to Google Inc and sought details from them about the identity sender and the place from where it has been sent from,” a senior police official said. Preliminary investigations by CCIC sleuths have, meanwhile, revealed that the Gmail account — from which Rajan has received the death threat —has been accessed from different countries, including Australia, Canada, Italy, Germany, the US, Nigeria, Poland, Belgium, Hong Kong and Ukraine, during the past couple of weeks.
The investigators have a reason to believe that the sender might have used a proxy Internet Protocol address to send the mail. They suspect that the email could be the handiwork of a Nigerian group that runs a racket of sending threat mails to people across the world.