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Indian police arrest engineer who they say glorified Islamic State on Twitter | Indian police arrest engineer who they say glorified Islamic State on Twitter |
(about 9 hours later) | |
NEW DELHI — A computer engineer who police said ran a Twitter account glorifying the Islamic State terrorist organization was arrested Saturday and charged with violating Internet regulations and attempting to “wage war against Asiatic powers.” | NEW DELHI — A computer engineer who police said ran a Twitter account glorifying the Islamic State terrorist organization was arrested Saturday and charged with violating Internet regulations and attempting to “wage war against Asiatic powers.” |
Police said Mehdi Masoor Biswas, 24, was arrested in an early-morning raid at his small apartment in the southern city of Bangalore, India’s information technology hub. | |
Police said he told them that he had used the Twitter handle @ShamiWitness for several years. Biswas, who has been called a “keyboard jihadi,” has worked for a multinational food company for the past two years. His identity was exposed by the British television station Channel Four on Thursday. | |
Even though Biswas was “more than a sympathizer” of the Islamic State, he did not recruit Indians into the organization, police said in Bangalore. | |
“As of now, we know that he never recruited anybody. Nor did he facilitate any such activity in India,” said M.N. Reddy, police commissioner of Bangalore, during a news conference. “He never traveled outside India. He used the virtual world.” | |
Biswas, the son of an employee of the government-run electricity company in the eastern state of West Bengal, became interested in radical Islamic literature in 2009, police said. He would retweet information from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, the Gaza strip and Israel, and also tweet translations from Arabic literature, according to the police. | |
“He used to work in his office during the day and became active on the Internet late into the night,” said Lala Rukum, director general of police in Bangalore. He would read breaking news related to the Islamic State and then “ferociously tweet” it to his more than 17,000 followers, Rukum, said. | |
He earned a salary of about $10,000 a year in his day job. | |
In an interview with a reporter from the Indian Express newspaper published Saturday, Biswas said by telephone that he had been framed and that “somebody must have hacked my e-mail account.” | |
“I did tell Channel 4 that I believe beheading is part of Islam,” the Indian Express quoted Biswas as saying. “It does not mean I believe in beheading.” | “I did tell Channel 4 that I believe beheading is part of Islam,” the Indian Express quoted Biswas as saying. “It does not mean I believe in beheading.” |
Another Indian engineer was arrested this year after he returned from spending six months in Iraq with Islamic State fighters. But he said that most of his time there was taken up with doing odd jobs such as cleaning toilets. |