Three event management professionals were prevented from boarding a flight on Monday after the vengeful mother and sister of a model they had dropped from a show called security staff to say they were terrorists.

By the time the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) confirmed that Ananya Dutta, husband Sudipto and Prithwiraj Ghosh were not terrorists, the trio had missed their scheduled IndiGo flight to Agartala at 8.05am.

Ananya, Sudipto and Prithwiraj later filed an FIR in which they named the mother and sister of Suranjana Guha, a 20-year-old model, as the culprits. “They identified the landline and cellphone numbers that were recorded on the caller-line identification apparatus as those of the model’s mother Papiya and elder sibling Nilanjana,” a senior airport official said.

The trio, members of Ananya Advertising and Co-ordination, told the police that Papiya and Nilanjana may have been trying to get even with them for dropping Suranjana from the team of models selected to walk the ramp at a show in Agartala.

The 20-year-old was to have boarded the same flight but was left out of the 20-member troupe when the organisers discovered that she hadn’t brought along her identity card.

“We genuinely wanted her to be part of the troupe...I suspect Suranjana’s family members made the calls out of spite, though it is very difficult for us to believe they could do something like this,” said Sudipto.

Although Sudipto, his wife and their colleague identified the Guhas’ phone numbers, they couldn’t tell the police where the family lives. “We have requested BSNL and the cellphone service provider for the address of the subscriber so that we can pick up Papiya and Nilanjana for interrogation,” a police officer said.

The two calls that grounded the trio from Ananya Advertising and Co-ordination — the rest of the troupe boarded the flight — had been made from the landline to the domestic airport manager’s office around 7am. Based on previous calls made to them from that number, the complainants presumed that Papiya was behind the “terror warning”.

The second call, from Nilanjana’s cellphone, went to the airport police station 10 minutes later.

“Both callers were women. They gave descriptions of three alleged terrorists who were planning to attack the airport and claimed that the trio had already entered the premises. Based on this information, we detained the three event managers as they were making their way to the security hold after checking in,” one of the investigators said.