The word “bandh” vaguely sounded like “bomb” on a long-distance call. And a 54-year-old executive of an IT firm had to pay the price, having been picked up by police from his home early on Wednesday and grilled for hours.

The Salt Lake resident, however, could finally prove his innocence and was set free.

The executive, the vice-president of a south Calcutta-based company, had called the Indian (airline) call centre in Delhi on Tuesday evening to inquire whether Trinamul Congress’s 48-hour bandh would have any impact on flight schedules. He focussed mainly on two Calcutta-Guwahati Alliance Air flights.

The person who was answering the call thought the executive was reporting a bomb threat to the two Alliance Air flights and promptly brought the matter to the notice of the airline authorities. The airline then contacted police.

“After receiving the complaint, we picked up the executive and questioned him on Wednesday morning. However, the bomb-threat assessment committee of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) later concluded that it was a non-specific threat. The man was released in the evening,” said Praveen Kumar, superintendent of police (North 24-Parganas).

An Indian official termed the episode “a tragedy of errors”.

“There was a miscommunication between the person who received the call and the executive. The person mistakenly heard the executive talking about a bomb threat to two of our flights on the Calcutta-Guwahati route, on Wednesday evening and Thursday morning,” the official said.

“The executive, who had called the airline to book a ticket on the Wednesday evening flight, denied he had ever talked about a bomb threat. Later, when the AAI briefed us about the non-specific nature of the threat, we were convinced that he was speaking the truth,” police superintendent Kumar said.

Security at the airport was beefed up following the episode.