Bengaluru: The Central Crime Branch (CCB) of Bengaluru police has filed a charge sheet against Mehdi Masroor Biswas, 24, the suspected handler of pro-Islamic State Twitter account, @ShamiWitness.

The CCB’s investigation team filed the charge sheet before a special court here on Monday, more than five-and-a-half months after Biswas’s arrest. Police had arrested Biswas, who was then working as a manufacturing executive with ITC Foods, from his one-room rented flat near Jalahalli in Gangammanagudi police limits on December 13, 2014, after Britain’s Channel 4 broadcast an interview with him.

In the interview, Biswas is heard admitting to handling @ShamiWitness, an IS propagandist Twitter account, for the last few years. Biswas’s Twitter account had more than 17,000 followers at the time of his arrest.

“The charge sheet runs into 36,986 pages, including exhibits, and contains details of about 1.22 lakh tweets and 18,000 followers. We have charged him under various sections of appropriate Acts and are confident of proving the charges in the court of law,” Joint Commissioner of (Crime) M Chandrashekhar said.

The charges

The CCB claimed that Biswas was a “representative” of Islamic State (IS) chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and planned to “establish” the caliphate. He made a “mockery” of those opposed to Baghdadi and the IS. He described the militants killed in Jammu and Kashmir as “martyrs” and urged Indians to support the IS. In the interview to Channel 4, he even expressed a desire to join the IS. Tests have “proved” that the voice in the interview was Biswas’s. The CCB also collected evidence about his contacts with “terrorists who know the English language”.

Biswas created “fake” e-mail IDs between January 25, 2013, and December 11, 2014, used the available content on the Internet and generated 1,22,203 tweets, besides uploading 15, 446 pictures. He used the Twitter account as a platform to “expand the base of his operations and instil fear among non-Muslims”. He “shared” the details of bordering areas of the IS to help those willing to join the organisation.

Mehdi has been charged under IPC sections 505 (statements conducing to public mischief), 121 (waging or attempting to wage war, or abetting waging of war, against the government of India), 124 (a) (sedition) and 153 (a) (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc, and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony), section 66 (f) (cyber terrorism) of IT Act, 2000, and sections 13(1)(b) (advocating, abetting, advising or inciting any unlawful activity), 18 (b) recruiting of any person or persons for terrorist activity and 39 (support given to a terrorist organisation) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2008.

Bengaluru: A local court Sunday sent pro-Islamic State (IS) terror group tweeter Mehdi Masroor Biswas to five day police custody for interrogation, a police official said.

“We had produced Mehdi before the sessions court, which remanded him to five day police custody till Dec 18 for interrogation by our investigation team on his unlawful activities,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Abhishek Goyal told IANS here.

Biswas was arrested early Saturday following a British news channel Dec 11 unmasking the city-based 24-year-old executive as a supporter of IS through social media and Twitter handle @ShamiWitness.

“Preliminary investigation reveals that Mehdi Biswas is a propagandist of IS ideology and has been instrumental in influencing minds against our friendly countries against whom the terror group is at war,” Additional Director General of Police Hemant Nimbalkar told reporters later.

Police registered a case against Biswas under sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Information Technology (IT) Act.

“We are quizzing him on his virtual and actual relations with the terror group and checking his antecedents, including mobile calls, e-mails, chat sessions and postings in the social media like Facebook, blogs and Twitter,” Nimbalkar said.

A police team raided Biswas’ one-room apartment in the northern suburb early Saturday and apart from arresting him, seized two mobiles, one laptop, incriminating documents, religious literature, pictures, pen drivers and compact discs (CDs) from the premises.

“We are also probing if Biswas or the terror group has any local presence in the form of sleeper cells or networks,” Nimbalkar added.

Biswas, who hails from Gopalpur town in West Bengal’s Nadia district, is employed in the foods division of the Kolkata-based ITC Ltd in Bengaluru.

He admitted to the probe team that he had been operating the Twitter account after he got interested in the developments of the Middle Eastern region.

He has about 17,000 Twitter followers and used to aggressively tweet by collecting information on regional developments.

Bangalore Police Comissinor Mr. M.N Reddy, said on Monday that Shamiwitness could have been anyone in the world, it is only a coincidence that he happened to be in Bangalore.

When Nasheman inquired about his Twitter being reactivated, Mr. Reddy smiled and said that he does not knows who did it.

(With inputs from IANS)

Bengaluru: Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who went by the nomme de guerre Shamiwitness was undoubtedly the most popular English voices of the Islamic State on Twitter, but the police interrogation since his arrest Saturday Dec 13th, has revealed that he had no direct contact with ISIS or any Jihadi groups.

Biswas was detained by Bengaluru police early Saturday morning, after Britain’s Channel 4 News had aired the report regarding the country’s IT capital’s link with the Twitter account that is followed by foreign fighters.

Mehdi, an electrical engineer from Kolkata, had moved to Bengaluru in 2011. He has two sisters and his father is a retired employee of the West Bengal state Electricity Board. He had been employed with the multinational corporation as a marketing executive since 2012 at an annual salary of Rs. 5.3 lakh.

Police interrogation after Mehdi’s arrest

Mehdi got interested in the developments in middle-east countries like Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza strip, Egypt and Libya since 2003. He used to work during the day and surfed internet on a 60 GB monthly plan late into nights.

During the initial questioning, he said that he mainly concentrated on Muslims living abroad “as the Indian muslims were incapable of Jihad.” It is also learnt that more than 17,000 followers in his twitter account were English-Speakers from Europe.

Most of his tweets have been deleted and the account was shut down after the report surfaced. Even the police have not found any activity against India or anti-India tweets so far. Also there is no evidence to prove that he had planned terror attack in India. He had no previous criminal record too.

Even though Mehdi had contact with English speaking ISIS men on twitter, he did not reveal his true identity to them. Mehdi was not involved in any of the activity in propagating the ISIS agenda. He was just translating the arabic tweets into English. He collected the data and videos of ISIS from cyberspace and then posted on the internet.

Police also said that Mehdi has not travelled outside the country neither he received any funds from ISIS.

Mehdi’s interview to UK Channel 4

Channel 4’s investigators, meanwhile, discovered that Mehdi aka @ShamiWitness had used a personal email address, ElSaltador@gmail.com, to set up a personal Twitter account, @ElSaltador. Based on this lead, the channel found out that the same email address had been used to open personal LinkedIn and Google Groups accounts. The data enabled them to contact Mehdi  in Bangalore.

Reached by Channel 4, he denied that he intended to win over recruits to the Islamic State, saying his tweets only expressed his opinion. “Just because someone follows me, it doesn’t mean that I am the reason for their joining ISIS,” he said in the audio interview that was telecast along with the report.

But in the Channel 4 interview, he made clear his support for Islamic State, adding that he was prevented from joining the group by his commitments to his family.

According to Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a graduate from Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an authority on the ongoing conflict in Syria, “It would not really be accurate to characterize Shami so much an ‘IS source’ as much as a ‘disseminator’, as Peter Neumann of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization puts it…If one looks back on Shami’s Twitter feed, as more and more official IS venues of information on Twitter emerged, much of the time he was simply retweeting. Shami’s role can therefore also be described as an ‘aggregator’ of IS content, something he also did in the days before official IS (IS) provincial news feeds and the like.”

Indian government sources said the UK’s intelligence services had been contacted for any information they might have on Mehdi, but were told he was not a person of interest for any ongoing terrorism investigation.