New Delhi, Oct. 25 -- The Delhi Police on Saturday said that they had apprehended a 16-year-old Class 11 student of a private school in central Delhi for allegedly emailing a bomb threat to her own school on Friday, in an attempt to get a four-day weekend by getting classes called off. Monday is a public holiday for Valmiki Jayanti, so a closure on Friday would have given her four days off. It is only the second time police have traced the sender of a school bomb hoax in the city since the emails began arriving in waves in 2024. As in the first, the sender was a student undone by a free virtual private network (VPN). The threat was declared a hoax after nothing suspicious was found, two police officers aware of the matter said, asking not to be identified. The girl allegedly sent the email from her mother's mobile phone through a free VPN, which one officer said failed under heavy load and exposed the phone's real IP address and location. "We collected information about the device and the IP address from the concerned service providers, examined it and finally traced the suspect," the officer said. Deputy commissioner of police (south) Anant Mittal said the school received an email with the subject line "Bombs Placed in Your Building" on Friday, and the district's cyber police station began a technical investigation in view of the recent spate of threats to schools. A team led by station house officer Hansraj Swamin identified the sender as a student of the same school, he said. Action has been taken against the girl under the Juvenile Justice Act and further proceedings are under way, Mittal said, crediting the cyber police station's "prompt response, technical expertise, and effective digital investigation". The case follows an HT report this month that found Delhi Police had cracked just one case in nearly two years of hoax threats to hundreds of schools. That case was also cracked by south district police. In January 2025, they traced a 17-year-old Class 12 student who had sent mass emails to schools on at least 10 to 12 occasions, after a weakness tied to the free VPN he was using gave investigators a lead. Both breakthroughs came against students using free tools. Investigators told HT earlier this month that about 99% of the threat emails trace to IP addresses outside India, and that requests to foreign companies for user details mostly go unanswered....