AHMEDABAD: Trinamool Congress' national spokesperson Saket Gokhale has said it was "an irony," that he was arrested for tweeting about PM Modi's visit to Morbi while the owner of Oreva "remained free."
This comes after the Gujarat Police arrested Gokhale over a tweet endorsing alleged fake news about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Morbi after the bridge collapse incident, which resulted in over 135 deaths.
The Trinamool spokesperson was apprehended from Jaipur in Rajasthan during the early hours by officials of the Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Cell, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Cyber Crime, Jitendra Yadav said.
Gokhale was produced before the Ahmedabad Metropolitan court on Tuesday evening, where he was granted remand for two days till December 8 at 12 noon.
The FIR was registered under Indian Penal Code Sections 465, 469, 471 (all pertaining to forgery) and 501 (printing or engraving matter known to be defamatory), police said.
Gokhale, 35, the spokesperson of the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC, underwent heart surgery recently and was on a private visit to Jaipur, sources said. He recently tweeted a news clipping which apparently appeared to have been published in a leading Gujarati newspaper.
The news clipping claimed a query under the Right to Information (RTI) revealed the Gujarat government had spent Rs 30 crore on PM Modi's visit to Morbi after a bridge collapsed there in October.
The bridge tragedy had claimed 135 lives.
Citing the news clipping which he attached to his tweet, Gokhale said, "RTI reveals that Modi's visit to Morbi for a few hours cost Rs 30 crore... Just Modi's event management and PR costs more than the lives of 135 innocent people."
Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Cell, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Jitendra Yadav said, "A complaint was filed before the Ahmedabad cybercrime cell by a person who was disturbed by Gokhale’s tweet, after a complaint, we started an investigation and found out that Saket Gokhale had shared false information of RTI, in which he had shared Gujarati News Paper Clipping claiming reported by Gujarat Samachar basis of RTI, Cyber Crime police first checked with the local authorities, found that no such information was shared under RTI."
ACP JM Yadav further said, "When we contacted News Paper Gujarat Samachar’s Management, they told us that they never published such kind of news and it was created by someone to look authentic but it is fake. Thus, we have arrested Gokhale for spreading fake news."
(With Inputs from TNIE correspondent Dilip Singh Kshatriya and PTI)