Five-day police custody for Twitter jehadi Mehdi Biswas
A senior police officer handling the arrest of ISIS Twitter account handler Mehdi Masroor Biswas, has received a chilling revenge threat, even as the young laptop radical has been remanded to five-day police custody.
The revenge threat was posted on a Twitter account of DCP Crime Abhishek Goyal who is handling the sensitive case and tweeted the news of Mehdi Biswas’ arrest. A tweet from Twitter handle @abouanfal6 that was posted on Sunday reads, “@goyal_abhei we will not leave our brothers in your hand. Revenge is coming, wait for our reaction.”
Responding to the threat, Goyal said he was not taking it very seriously. “Personally I’m not taking the threat very seriously... I am taking it in my stride and am not very alarmed,” he said.
Twenty-four-year-old engineer Mehdi Biswas, who was arrested on Saturday in Bengaluru and remanded to five days’ police custody, used his micro-blog Twitter account @ShamiWitness to radicalise English-speaking followers, who numbered over 17,000. He has already confessed that he was handling the pro-jehad Twitter account, which had become a source of incitement and information for new ISIS recruits.
DCP Crime Goyal said the Bengaluru CCB has got five days’ police remand of Mehdi Biswas. “He was presented before the Magistrate late on Saturday night,” he said.
Mehdi Biswas has been arrested under Section 125 of IPC (waging war against the Government of any Asiatic power in alliance or at peace with the Government of India or attempts to wage such war, or abets the waging of such war), Sections 18 and 39 of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, police had said.
According to police, Biswas, who hails from West Bengal, was working in Bengaluru as an executive with ITC Foods. late on Friday night, channel4.com of United Kingdom had released an interview with Biswas in which he said he was ready to surrender but added he feared for his life.
“I want to state clearly that I won’t resist arrest when the time comes. I don’t have any weapons with me. I have no intention of resisting,” Mehdi told channel4.com.
He also went on to assert that he had done no wrong. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t harmed anybody; I haven’t broken any laws of the country. I haven’t waged any war or incited any violence against the public of India... I haven’t waged war against any allies of India. They might try to bring that charge. I haven’t waged war against anybody. I just said stuff, people followed me, then I followed them back and then we talked. I only knew what the IS fighters or sympathisers said in public tweets.”
When asked why his story was trending all over the world, Mehdi Biswas said: “I think for the first time there’s a Muslim who can actually enunciate in English and get the message across and which has really pissed off our enemies, enemies of Muslims.”
The Twitter handle, taken down after the channel4.com report, had almost 130,000 tweets which were seen more than two million times each month. This, perhaps, is the highest number for any pro-ISIS Twitter account. It had around 17,800 followers.
Biswas is the son of a retired employee of the West Bengal State Electricity Board and has two unmarried sisters. Biswas became interested in radical Islamic literature in 2009, the police said. He would re-tweet information from Syria, Egypt, lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Israel, and tweet translations from Arabic literature, according to the police.