Calcutta, Aug. 2: A navy officer’s car, parked in front of the arrival lounge of the domestic terminal for over an hour, sparked a scare at Calcutta airport tonight.

Bomb squad personnel scanned the car from outside and then smashed its windows and sent a sniffer dog in.

Capt. H.N. Rasappan, who had come to see off a relative, returned to find a melee around his Maruti Esteem.

Airport officials said several announcements were made asking the owner to move the car with a Maharashtra registration, but no one responded. “It was parked in the unauthorised area and though there was an army sticker on it, we could not take chances,” a senior CISF officer said. “Its doors were locked and the owner could not be traced. So, we had to break the window and open the door to search for explosives,” he added.

Rasappan, however, was let off with a fine of Rs 300.

The first alarm at the airport was sounded in the afternoon when a camera was found at the domestic terminal.

Several scare calls came to the Lalbazar police headquarters today as they have since panic spread across the city on Tuesday evening when an email warning of blasts reached media houses.

Police traced the cyber café from where the mail was sent to Salt Lake’s IA block and arrested its owner Kaushik Basu.

The Basus’ domestic help Sabitri Dandapat, who held charge of the café in Kaushik’s absence, was held the next day.

The sleuths are still clueless about who sent the mail. “There were a few people at the café when the mail was delivered, but Kaushik Basu did not keep a record of Net users,” said an officer of the detective department’s cyber crime wing.

The police questioned minister Abdur Rezzak Mollah’s driver yesterday to find out how the sender of the mail could have known his car’s registration number. The mail had given the number and said the car was packed with explosives.