Investigations by Mumbai Police have disclosed that along with Bulli Bai app, several other handles were also used on social media platforms, apparantly intended to disunite Sikh and Muslims.
Three persons have been arrested in the Bulli Bai case and the probe has shown other social media handles that were used to spread hate messages, said Hemant Nagrale, Mumbai Police Commissioner.
As per the investigation, handles deployed to spread hatred on microblogging platform Twitter are: @Bullibai_, @Sage0x11, @hmmaachaniceoki, @jatkhalsa, @jatkhalsa7, @Sikh_Khalsa11, @wannabesigmaf, etc,.
The police said that all these handles were purportedly linked to the Sikh community and according to information available on @Bullibai, the KSF Khalsa Sikh Force had created the app Bulli Bai.
It was also sought to convey that one Khalsa Supremacist was a ‘follower’ of Bulli Bai, according to the probe.
In July last year, an app similiar to Bulli Bai; Sulli Bai was created, using the open-source software platform GitHub on which pictures of prominent Muslim women were posted.
The Mumbai Cyber Police have arrested three accused — including a 21-year-old techie, Vishal Kumar Jha, a second-year civil engineering student from Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering in Bengaluru.
Jha managed to conceal his identity using his technical expertise to a great extent. Through a Twitter handle @Khalsasupremacist, he also claimed that he was living in Canada and kept changing his name frequently, besides running a YouTube channel, Tavasya Vats, the police added.
The Mumbai Police have also arrested Shweta Anant Singh, 18, from Uttarakhand’s Rudrapur, who is said to be the mastermind behind the app, and 21-year-old Mayank Pradeepsingh Rawat also from the same state.
On January 1, the entire issue snowballed into to a major political fracas with strong reactions from several leaders from the Congress, Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party, union ministers, elected representatives, prominent women, activists and others, after which the Mumbai Police filed an FIR against unknown persons, including developers of the app and the Twitter handles which promoted it.
The police took action after several complaints were filed by Muslim women that morphed pictures, without consent of hundreds of prominent Muslim women were being uploaded for ‘auction’ on the Bulli Bai app.
The accused tried to convey an impression that the social media handles were created by the Sikh community, targeted Muslim women in this manner and attempted to “drive a wedge between the two communities”, the police said adding, however the prompt arrests have prevented any untoward situation.
