Kathmandu, August 24:

A pressure cooker bomb and another fake bomb planted at Patandhoka of Lalitpur created a tense situation for over three hours this afternoon. Security personnel disposed the hoax bomb and diffused the bomb at around 4pm.

Commoners were terrified when police seized the area and the security forces took almost three hours to defuse the bomb. Earlier today, a fake bomb planted at New Baneshwor chowk terrorised people for over an hour.

Traffic remained halted till the security forces found that the suspicious package was no more than a plastic bag containing two trousers. “The placing of the bag was intentional and was meant to terrorise the people,” said a police official at Baneshwor ward police office. Meanwhile, security personnel today recovered 100 passports, which were stolen from the Bhaktapur district administration office more than one-and-a-half month ago. The passports were recovered from an unattended bag lying on the road at Gatthaghar.

Interestingly, when a police patrol saw the suspicious bag, it called for the support of a bomb disposal team thinking that the bag might be a bomb. But when the bomb disposal team came and checked it, the package turned out to be a package of 100 passports. The retrieved passports were among the 250 passports stolen on July 14 from the office. The incident occurred at around 2 pm today.