Cops question former consultant of The Wire over forged reports

Delhi Police questioned a former consultant of The Wire for close to seven hours on Thursday, days after it opened a case of alleged criminal conspiracy and defamation against the news website.

Delhi Police questioned a former consultant of The Wire for close to seven hours on Thursday, days after it opened a case of alleged criminal conspiracy and defamation against the news website that ran a series of stories that turned out to be based on fabricated documents.

Cops question former consultant of The Wire over forged reports

The questioning involved Devesh Kumar, who was involved in a report that made sensational claims about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s information technology cell head Amit Malviya. The Wire, in the false reportage that it has now pulled down, alleged that the social media firm Meta gave Malviya special privileges to report any user’s post for immediate removal from the social media service Instagram.

The first investigation report (FIR) on which The Wire is being investigated was based on a complaint by Malviya, who has named four of the website’s editors, including its founder and current chief editor Siddharth Varadarajan.

The Wire, which initially defended its reportage, later accused Kumar of forgery in a separate police complaint. Curiously, the website’s original report did not carry Kumar’s byline though he was credited in subsequent clarifications, which too turned out to cite fake documents, and he was eventually singled out by The Wire’s editors as the person who allegedly duped them.

A senior police officer said that Kumar has been called for questioning as a “person of interest”. He reached the Crime Branch office in Chanakyapuri around 1pm and was at the office till around 8pm. “He is being questioned regarding the stories that were published on The Wire in the month of October. The allegation is that those stories were based on fake documents and were deliberately published to tarnish the image of the complainant,” the officer said, adding that the probe is at a very “nascent” stage.

The report on Malviya was published on October 10, immediately triggering scepticism from experts and categorical denials from Meta. The story was credited to Jahnavi Sen, who too has been booked in the FIR. But Kumar’s name featured along with Sen’s and Vardarajan’s in the subsequent reports, which purported to showed emails from Meta executives and independent experts that in reality did not exist.

A second officer aware of the matter said that a team visited Kumar’s residence in Bihar where he was asked to join investigation. “His devices including a phone and two laptops were seized for examination. He was then asked to come to Delhi for further questioning,” the officer said. Delhi Police had also visited the offices of The Wire, and the homes of its editors Vardarajan, MK Venu, Sidharth Bhatia, and Sen, earlier this week.