Police investigating if Mehdi's tweets incited people to commit offences

Following the arrest of Mehdi Masroor Biswas for allegedly operating a pro-IS (Islamic State) Twitter account, the Bengaluru Police on Tuesday said they were working to establish whether the information passed by him had incited people to commit offences punishable under the law.

"We have registered cases under various sections of law including Section 125, Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, so now we need to collect evidence on those lines as to whether the information passed by him have led to incitement and instigation of people to commit offences which are punishable under the law," Bengaluru Police Commissioner M N Reddi told media persons here.

Terming the case 'unique', Reddi said the police was working on the vast amount of data collected from the Twitter company offices and the internet.

"This is a unique case because the evidence to prove that offence has been committed has to be collected from the internet, has to be collected from the twitter account. For this we have to download large amount of data. We are also in touch with the Twitter company in Delhi and US to help us get data that is not visible on the net but at the background like IP addresses, identity details etc. So it is a mammoth task to put together all this data and apply analytics on top of it," he added.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had yesterday told the Parliament that Mehdi's interrogation had indicated that his activities were limited to posting and reposting of pro-IS material on his Twitter account and social media sites.

An investigation by Britain's Channel 4 News had stated that the @ShamiWitness account, which reportedly had a massive 17,700 followers, was being run by Mehdi.

The report also claimed that he was ready to join the Islamic State himself if his family had not been dependant on him.

Mehdi belongs to a middle class family from Kolkata and did his electrical engineering from Guru Nanak Dev Institute of Technology in 2012. He later joined ITC following a campus recruitment drive.