MUMBAI/DEHRADUN: The Bulli Bai app plot thickened on Wednesday with the arrest of a third student who was allegedly part of the reprehensible ‘auctioning’ of Muslim women, and the outing of a Nepalese hand in the hate crime.
The cyber cell of the Mumbai Police arrested Mayank Rawat (21), who is a BSc Chemistry (honours) student at Delhi University’s Zakir Hussain College. He was picked up from Kotdwar in Pauri district of Uttarakhand on Tuesday evening. Rawat’s father is an Army personnel stationed in Jammu.
Yashwant Singh, senior police superintendent at Pauri Garhwal, said, “The Mumbai Police sought help after tracing Rawat by tracking his mobile phone, which he used to share links of apps where images of women were posted for auction.”
The second accused, Shweta Singh (18), lost her mother to cancer and father to Covid, after which she became active on social media and got acquainted with Vishal Kumar Jha, the first accused. Jha had revealed her identity to the police.
She was allegedly working on the instructions of her friend Giyou, a Nepal national.
She was using a fake Twitter handle with the name JattKhalsa07. The handle was being used for uploading hate posts and objectionable photos and comments.
People associated with her followed the same ideology.
She was taken into custody from Udham Singh Nagar district and then transit remand was sought till January 5 by Mumbai Police officials. Her name was revealed by Jha who was arrested earlier in Bengaluru.
Satej Patil, Maharashtra minister of state for home tweeted that Mumbai Police Cyber Cell has arrested a third accused, a 21-year old man from Uttarakhand in connection with the #BulliBaiApp with credible evidence.
“I am sure that Mumbai Police will soon unearth the entire nexus that enables such crime against women,” Patil said.
The police also claimed that the accused seemed to have used names related to the Sikh community in their Twitter handles which promoted the app in order to mislead people about their identity.
Shweta Singh, the 18-year-old woman arrested from Uttarakhand by the cyber cell of city police, was the prime accused who had created the Twitter handle of the app, said a senior police official here.
Singh, who has passed class 12 exam and was planning to pursue engineering, was acting on the instructions from one `Giyou' who was based in Nepal, he claimed.
Earlier in the day, Mumbai police commissioner Hemant Nagrale told reporters that some more people were likely to be involved in the matter.
Mayank Rawal (21) was nabbed from Uttarakhand in the early hours of Wednesday in the case.
Shweta Singh was arrested on Tuesday from Rudrapur in the same state, while engineering student Vishal Kumar Jha (21) was held from Bengaluru on Monday.
"As per the status of the handle (linked to the app), it says Bulli Bai is a community driven open source app by Khalsa Sikh Force. So why this (alias) is there, that is part of our investigation," the commissioner said.
Mumbai Police registered a First Information Report after receiving a complaint about the app on January 2, following which investigators started technical analysis of the app and the related twitter handle, Nagrale said.
"During the technical analysis, we collected information about the followers of the app and launched a hunt for the accused," he said.
Bengaluru-based Vishal Kumar Jha, a second-year civil engineering student, was one of the five followers of the handle, Nagrale claimed.
If any person wants to share information about the case, he or she can contact Mumbai cyber police, he said.
Nagrale also expressed displeasure about comments made by some "local authorities" outside Maharashtra about the case, saying it was unwarranted as they did not have full information.
The Mumbai police commissioner, however, refused to comment when asked if the accused in the case were also involved in the 'Sulli Deals' case (where a similar website targeting Muslim women had been created).
The latter case was being handled by Delhi Police, he said.
The app was hosted on the open-source software platform GitHub.
It was later blocked by the platform.
While there was no actual `auction' or `sale', the purpose of the app seemed to be to humiliate and intimidate the targeted women, many of whom are active social media users.
As per police officials, Shweta Singh, the alleged 18-year-old prime accused, had lost her father to COVID-19 and her mother to cancer.
A police release said that the use of names related to the Sikh community by the accused in their Twitter handles could have led to communal tension as the women who had been targeted belonged to another religion.
"Names related to the Sikh community were used to make it look like these Twitter handles had been created by persons from that community," it said.
The accused shared photos from the Bulli Bai app on Twitter by using handles like @bullibai_, @sage0x11, @jatkhalsa7, @wannabesigmaf, @jatkhalsa and @Sikh_khalsa11.
The information on the Twitter handle of the app claimed that its creator was "KSF Khalsa Sikh Force", while another Twitter handle, "Khalsa Supremacist", was its follower, the release said.
During the technical analysis, police found the involvement of Vishal Kumar Jha (21), a second year civil engineering student of Dayanand Sagar College of engineering, Bengaluru, it said.
The`Khalsa Supremacist' handle, allegedly used by Jha, mentioned the user's location as Canada, the release said.
A team of Mumbai cyber police including sub-inspectors Suyog Amrutkar, Amar Kamble and constable Deepak Patil arrested Shweta Singh and Mayank Rawal.
The operation was supervised by senior inspector Sanjay Govilkar.
(With PTI Inputs)