Delhi Police on Thursday reportedly arrested the main conspirator and creator of the ‘Bulli Bai’ app which targeted Muslim women by putting up their images online for ‘auction’.
Police sources told News18 that a person named Niraj Bishnoi has been arrested from Assam and is being brought to the national capital. The stated date of birth of the accused is September 27, 2001. Sources said Bishnoi is enrolled in second year B.Tech Computer Science at Vellore Institute of Technology, Bhopal.
This is the fourth arrest in the case after Mumbai Police arrested Mayank Rawal (21) from Uttarakhand in the early hours of Wednesday, a day after 18-year-old Shweta Singh was also arrested from the hill state. Engineering student Vishal Kumar Jha (21) was held from Bengaluru on Monday. Mumbai Police commissioner Hemant Nagrale has said that more people are likely to be involved in the case.
Mumbai Police had registered an FIR into the case 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.
Bengaluru-based Vishal Kumar Jha, a second-year civil engineering student, was one of the five followers of the handle, Nagrale said. He, however, refused to comment when asked if the accused in the case were also involved in the ‘Sulli Deals’ case, which is being handled by the Delhi Police wherein a similar website targeting Muslim women had been created.
The ‘Bulli Bai’ app being investigated by the Mumbai Police was hosted on the open-source software platform GitHub and was later blocked it. While there was no actual ‘auction’ or ‘sale’, the purpose of the app seemed to be to intimidate the targeted women, many of whom are active social media users.
Nepal Link
The prime accused in the case is 18-year-old Shweta Singh who allegedly created the Twitter handle of the app. According to police officials, Singh had passed Class 12 examination and was planning to pursue an engineering course. She reportedly lost her father to Covid-19 while her mother had died of cancer in 2011.
According to a report in news agency IANS, Singh has two sisters and the family was earning around Rs 13,000. The report said they were receiving Rs 3,000 from Vatsalya Yojana, the Uttarakhand government’s scheme for welfare of those orphaned by Covid-19 and Rs 10,000 from a manufacturing unit her father used to work with.
Police say Singh was working on the instructions of one ‘Giyou’ who is suspected to be based in Nepal. It is allegedly on this person’s instructions that she made a Twitter handle — @jattkhalsa07 — and started uploading photos of Muslim women.
Reports say the Mumbai Police now plan to confront the latest arrest Mayank Rawal with Shweta Singh and Vishal Kumar Jha.
Claim from ‘Real Mastermind’
According to a report in Hindustan Times, a Twitter user who uses the handle @giyu44 claimed to be the “real creator” of the app. “You have arrested the wrong person, slumbai police. I am the creator of #BulliBaiApp. Got nothing to do with the two innocents whom u arrested, release them asap,” the report quoted the user’s tweet as saying.
“When this fiasco started I wasn’t even aware of what it might entail, so I use my friends accounts. Both Vishal and that Swati girl, I use their accounts.. They didn’t even know what I was going to do. Now they got arrested coz of me… Feel free to abuse me in comments… I will personally surrender if someone arranges for my travel by flight,” it quoted subsequent tweets as saying.
The user also offered to share the real username, password and source code used to create the app, the report said, adding that Mumbai Police are tracing the owner of the handle to verify their claims.
Sikh Names Misused
The Mumbai Police have also claimed that the accused persons 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.
“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,” Mumbai police commissioner Hemant Nagrale said.
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.
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