A bomb squad with sniffer dogs at a school after a hoax call in Bangalore on Monday. (Bangalore News Photos)

Bangalore, July 28: D.V. Raju had just dropped his daughter to school and was driving back home when his mobile rang.

It was his wife and she was frantic.

Some city schools, she told him, had received calls that bombs had been placed in their compounds.

Raju braked, did a U-turn and drove back to pick up his daughter.

“Everything seems normal, but we don’t want to take any chances,” he said later. “The scenes we are seeing on television, with even children not being spared, is horrific.”

The school on Residency Road wasn’t the only one to have received the calls, which later turned out to be hoaxes.

Two others also got similar calls, just as the IT city was shrugging off Friday’s serial bombings that killed a woman.

The blast trail also appeared to have gone cold with the national focus shifting to Ahmedabad, where 16 explosions the day after killed 49 people and injured dozens.

For students of Bangalore’s St Aloysius Boys School in Cox Town, St Anthony’s in Jayanagar, and Carmel in Tilak Nagar, Monday morning blues came in the form of bomb squads.

All three, with 850 to 1,000 students each, had received calls that bombs would go off within the next hour. Police were soon called in and the schools evacuated.

As news of the calls and police searches spread, thousands of anxious parents descended on schools across the city, creating traffic snarls on Residency Road, Richmond Road and Ulsoor where many schools are located.

One parent, Latha, waited for her son outside St Aloysius as the police searched the compound.

“I stay a few hundred metres from the school. My brother who was passing by called me to say that sniffer dogs were at the school. I immediately came down,” she said.

Police officials confirmed that all the three schools had received calls and a check had revealed that they were hoaxes.

“On Sunday, too, there were three calls. A dump yard in Koramangala, K.C. General Hospital and a popular Kannada actor’s house were the three locations,” city police commissioner Shankar Bidari said.

“There have been six hoaxes in the last two days.”

Bidari refused to comment on investigations into Friday’s blasts but said the force was working on definite leads.

So far, no sketch of any of the suspects has been released though several citizens have come forward to say that they have seen those who planted the bombs.

One of them told reporters he had seen two persons “working” behind a transformer on Langford Road on the day of the blast. He said when he asked them if they were from a power utility as he had a complaint, the two said they were from a cable company. “I’ll be able to identify them,” the citizen said, after an explosion in the same spot where he had seen the two rocked the area.

The police are also working on a theory that the terrorists carried out a dry run the day before as an explosion was reported on Bangalore-Mysore Road at Channapatna, 70km from the city.