Indian man convicted over fake airline bomb threat in Geneva

GENEVA – Swiss authorities have convicted and sentenced to six months in prison an Indian man who staged a false bomb alert involving an Aeroflot passenger plane.

The Geneva prosecutor's office said the Friday ruling for "threats alarming the population" came a day after authorities had evacuated all passengers from the Moscow-bound plane and police anti-bomb squads took hours to scour it.

The office says the man convicted made the threat at an airline counter at Geneva's Cointrin airport. He was not identified other than as an Indian national born in 1977

He was arrested after the incident. Under questioning, he downplayed the severity of his threats, the prosecutor's office said.

A spokesman for the prosecutor's office said the man was not a suspected extremist, but did not elaborate.