Bengaluru man suspected of operating ISIS twitter account arrested

BENGALURU/KOLKATA: A day after the UK media revealed that one of the Twitter handles popular among Islamic State jihadists was being operated out of Bengaluru, police arrested ITC employee Mehdi Masroor Biswas from his one-room apartment in the city in the wee hours of Saturday.

“He knows that it is he,” city police commissioner MN Reddi told reporters, saying the 24-year-old was not “hiding” and that he didn’t resist arrest when police zeroed in on his home in north Bengaluru’s Jalahalli. “He was still working on his computer when the police went in,” said Hemant Nimbalkar, joint commissioner (internal security), adding that two mobile phones and a laptop were seized from the accused.

Biswas has been charged with waging war against an Asiatic power friendly with India, conspiracy to commit, advocate, abet, incite and facilitate commission of terrorist acts and sending offensive messages. Reddi said that Biswas was living a double life and spent his nights reading up on events in West Asia.

Using his laptop and a 60 GB per month broadband connection, he translated Arabic tweets from the Eastern Mediterranean region — Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, among others — into English, mainly for the benefit of English-speaking terrorists (Channel 4 got interested in his tweets because of this). He operated alone and was not part of any group. Biswas was not involved in any terror activity inside India, Reddi said, pointing out “he has never travelled abroad, never recruited anybody nor did he facilitate” recruitment to ISIS. Reddi’s revelations seemed like a far cry from the official release in which Mehdi is termed “ISIS Twitter Ideologue”.

Mehdi, a resident of Gopalpur in West Bengal’s 24 Paraganas district, was hired by ITC Foods through a campus interview in 2012 (with a salary of `5.3 lakh a year). Biswas’ employer ITC, in an email statement, said it is cooperating with the security agencies. “He was selected from a campus recruitment and has worked in a junior trainee capacity for about two years. In such cases, where a candidate does not have prior work experience, the company does a reference check with the educational institution.”

In Kolkata, his father Mekhail Biswas said his son was innocent and that his Twitter account had been hacked by someone else. The former employee of West Bengal State Electricity Board told ET that he doesn’t subscribe to ISIS ideology and that he was leaving for Bengaluru. “My son is busy with his office duty from 8.45 in the morning till night. He is busy with his work and we are really shocked to know about his arrest,” Mekhail said.

ADG (Internal Security) Pawan Kumar Garg said there was no intelligence regarding Mehdi prior to Friday’s news report, acknowledging that the police would not have known of Mehdi but for the Channel 4 report.