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Bulli Bai app: Engineering student arrested in Mumbai, woman held in Uttarakhand

ByManish K Pathak
Jan 04, 2022 05:46 PM IST

Bulli Bai app case: Vishal Kumar’s lawyer said the engineering student arrested by Mumbai cyber police was innocent and has been “falsely implicated in the case”.

MUMBAI: Vishal Kumar, the 21-year-old engineering student detained on Monday from Bengaluru, was placed under arrest by the Mumbai cyber police on Tuesday in connection with its probe into two apps where images of Muslim women were posted in an attempt to “auction” them, police said.

Bulli Bai app case: Vishal Kumar, a second-year civil engineering student, was arrested by Mumbai cyber police after being questioned for nearly 20 hours. (ANI)
Bulli Bai app case: Vishal Kumar, a second-year civil engineering student, was arrested by Mumbai cyber police after being questioned for nearly 20 hours. (ANI)

A second-year civil engineering student, Vishal Kumar was questioned for 20 hours before the police decided to arrest him on Tuesday.

Kumar was running one of the Twitter handles used to upload the content from the app, an officer from the Mumbai cyber crime cell said.

“Vishal Kumar was apprehended from Bengaluru on Monday afternoon and he was brought to Mumbai in the evening. He was questioned and several facts were verified and after his role was found involved in the crime, he was arrested,” said joint commissioner of police Milind Bharambe (crime).

“The accused was taken to the Bandra court around 4pm for his custody remand for further investigation,” added Bharambe. The judge remanded him in police custody till January 10.

Vishal Kumar’s lawyer D Prajapati said he was innocent. “My client is falsely implicated in this case,” he told reporters after the court hearing, according to news agency ANI.

The Mumbai police have also detained a woman in Uttarakhand in connection with the case. Police officers, however, refused to divulge details about the woman.

The Mumbai cyber police started a fresh probe into the offensive apps after registering a first information report (FIR) under sections 153A, 153 B, 295A, 354D, 509, 500 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) along with Section 67 Information Technology Act against unknown persons on Sunday.

The case was based on statements of some women who complained that their photographs were among the hundreds that were uploaded by an unidentified group on an app using the online platform ‘GitHub’ for an ‘auction’ and were shared with the term, ‘Bulli deal of the day’.

In 2021 too, pictures of many Muslim women and girls were uploaded on the same ‘GitHub’ platform under the name “Sulli Deals”.

While the latest app came to light on January 1 after women who were targeted approached police, the previous app was floated in July last year. The Mumbai police’s Intelligent Fusion and Strategic Operations Unit (IFSO), which deals with major cybercrimes, registered the FIR in the first case in July.

The police have sought information from GitHub, the platform used to make the app and Twitter, where links to the app were posted on several accounts which are now deactivated. “We are yet to get a reply from Git Hub in the first case. The case can only proceed once they share the IP address of the users,” the above-mentioned officer of the IFSO, who asked not to be named, said.

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