Beijing: A 29-year-old man has been detained in China for a hoax bomb warning that forced the diversion of a domestic flight, Xinhua reported.
Xiong Yi, a resident of Shiyan city in Hubei province, was taken by plane to provincial capital Wuhan, police said.
"I was wrong, and I feel regret," the man said after arriving at the Wuhan airport.
Xiong was caught on Saturday in a hotel in Dongguan in the southern province of Guangdong.
The man made an anonymous phone call to an airport in Shenzhen in Guangdong on Thursday, claiming that explosives had been planted on Shenzhen Airlines Flight ZH9706 bound for Shenzhen from Xiangyang in Hubei. The plane was in mid-air at the time of the call.
He claimed the explosives would be detonated 45 minutes after take-off.
The plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Wuhan. Police checked the aircraft but found no dangerous items.
A similar incident took place last week, when an Air China flight from Beijing to New York returned to the Chinese capital after a threatening message was received. Nothing was found in the plane, which departed for New York a few hours later.
IANS
First Published: Sunday, September 02, 2012, 16:40