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20-yr-old from U’khand is 3rd arrest in GitHub case
The police said the accused appeared to have used names related to the Sikh community in their Twitter handles which promoted the webpages in order to mislead people about their identity and add a communal angle.
Three people have been arrested so far in connection with webpages where hundreds of Muslim women were “auctioned”, the Mumbai Police said on Wednesday, apprehending a 20-year-old a day after two accused were arrested from Bengaluru and Uttarakhand.
The police said the accused appeared to have used names related to the Sikh community in their Twitter handles which promoted the webpages in order to mislead people about their identity and add a communal angle.
“The probe is on and anyone involved in the crime directly or indirectly will be arrested and prosecuted,” Mumbai Police commissioner Hemant Nagrale said. Some more people were likely to be involved in the matter, he said at a news briefing.
Eighteen-year-old Shweta Singh, who is understood to be the main accused, created some of the social media handles that promoted the webpages. On Wednesday, her friend Mayank Rawat, 20, was also arrested from Uttarakhand. Vishal Kumar Jha, 21, was detained from Bengaluru on Monday and arrested a day later.
The Mumbai Police are probing two such controversial webpages hosted on the code sharing platform, GitHub. The first web page was floated in July 2021 and the second, Bulli Bai, surfaced on January 1. The webpages, which were named after derogatory references to the Muslim community, sparked outrage because hundreds of Muslim women – most of whom were vocal activists or top professionals – were listed for “auction” along with their photographs, which were sourced without permission and doctored.
When asked if Sikh names were used by social media handles which promoted the webpages, Nagrale said it appeared that such attempts were made. Some of these handles had names such as “Khalsa Supremacist”, “Jatinder Singh Bhullar” and “Harpal’, he said. “As per the status of the handle (linked to the app), it says Bulli Bai is a community driven open source app by Khalsa Sikh force. So why this is there, that is part of our investigation,” the commissioner said. “It is too early to say exactly what was the aim of the entire exercise,” he added.
“Jha was using the Twitter handle by name Khalsa Supermecist and was using a proxy location from Canada to misguide the law enforcement agencies. He would use such fake names to regularly post messages on Twitter,” an officer involved in the probe said. The officer said there was an attempt to give a communal angle to the webpages.
Nagrale said: “In order to ensure that no such incident is repeated again we urge people and the especially the victims of Bulli Bai or any such crime or incident to report the matter to police and share information.”
