NEW DELHI: Delhi Police on Monday carried out searches at the residences of the editors of news website The Wire, in connection with an FIR registered on the complaint of BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya.
The raids were conducted by the Crime Branch of the Delhi Police at the residences of the website’s founder editors Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M K Venu, and deputy editor Jahnavi Sen. Official sources said that in the raids, the police seized some electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops.
“An investigation was carried out and no arrests were done,” a senior official said. In his complaint, Malviya stated that the media company tried to tarnish his and his party’s image through a news story. “I am filing the present complaint for the offences of cheating, and forgery for the purpose of cheating, forgery for the purpose of harming the reputation, using as genuine a forged document or electronic record and defamation amongst other provisions of IPC,” Malviya’s complaint read.
The Wire had published the first of four articles (all now retracted) on October 6 claiming that Meta (the parent company that owns Facebook and Instagram) had removed an Instagram post within a few minutes of it being uploaded by an Instagram private account named Cringearchivist.
The post was about a recently built temple dedicated to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Ayodhya. It was assumed that the post was removed because of a glitch in some automated system. However, The Wire in its report on October 10 claimed that Meta took it down at the direction of the BJP leader.