Toronto: A Turkish Airlines flight bound for Istanbul from New York was diverted to Halifax, Canada, after a bomb threat, Canadian police said on Sunday.

The plane landed safely and police were searching it using dogs trained in explosives, the Nova Scotia branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said on Twitter.

‘Investigation into bomb threat is in its early stages. Threat was received at 10:50pm this evening,’ the police force tweeted.

Separately, the Halifax airport tweeted that the transfer of the 256 passengers and crew on the flight to the terminal was going smoothly and all were safe.

The airport’s tweet says 256 people were on board.

The RCMP in Nova Scotia said on its Twitter feed that it would not comment on the details of the bomb threat and was looking to identify the person or persons responsible.

It added that police will be ‘searching the Turkish Airlines plane using police dogs trained in explosives.’

The RCMP said the bomb threat was received at 10:50pm local time. Flight tracking sites show the flight had already taken off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York by then.

Last Tuesday night, Air France Flight 55 from Dulles International Airport outside Washington was diverted to Halifax after an anonymous bomb threat was phoned in after the plane had taken off. An FBI statement late Tuesday said authorities had investigated and found no credible threat, and the RCMP said investigators found no evidence of an explosive device.

That threat came after the 13 November attacks in Paris that killed 130 people and heightened security concerns worldwide.