NEW DELHI: The Crime Branch of Delhi Police on Thursday questioned Devesh Kumar, former consultant of The Wire, for several hours in connection with the ongoing case against the news platform registered on the complaint by BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya.“Whatever the police asked me, I have told them everything. Rest is part of the investigation,” said Kumar.
In his complaint last week, Malviya had stated that the media company tried to tarnish his and his party’s image through a series of news stories about social media company Meta, which claimed that he had special censorship privileges through an Instagram programme called “X-Check”.
“I am filing the 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.
Based on his complaint, the Delhi Police registered an FIR against ‘The Wire’ and its editors. Soon after this, the news portal filed a police complaint against its ex-researcher Devesh Kumar for being allegedly involved in the fabrication of documents. Interestingly, Malviya had not named Devesh Kumar in his complaint.
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 CM 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 claimed that Meta took it down at the direction of the BJP leader.
Earlier on Monday, the Crime Branch conducted raids at the residences of the website’s founder editors Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M K Venu, and deputy editor Jahnavi Sen.