Bengaluru: Police to hire hackers to trace Mehdi’s ‘fans’

Bengaluru: The city police are likely to hire hackers and cyber experts to investigate Mehdi Masroor Biswas’ ‘fan’ mail. They may outsource domain experts to access the earlier tweets and emails of Mehdi to his ‘fans,’ who have now joined hands with the brutally violent global jehadi movement – the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria (ISIS).

“The police are likely to ‘hire’ some software experts in this domain from outside to get to the extent of his reach. Though they have reportedly verified that @ShamiWitness was his twitter handle, they have hit a road block in accessing his earlier tweets and emails to his ‘fans’ the ISIS fighters, who allegedly joined the organisation after being influenced by Mehdi’s tweets.

The Mehdi case is the first major investigation in cyber terrorism, which is being handled by the Central Crime Branch of the City police.

“The police are neither adequately trained nor equipped in investigating cyber terrorism. Time factor is also important and it is imperative that they get experts including hackers to hack into his account and unravel the terror trail through his tweets and emails. It will be a futile effort if they have been deleted from the hard disk of his computer,” said an official source. Mehdi – the 24-year-old executive of a giant food conglomerate in Bengaluru, was arrested on December 13 on sedition charges for inciting youth to join ISIS through his tweets on his Twitter handle @ShamiWitness under the legal sections; for waging war against a friendly Asiatic country (Section 125 IPC), Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2004 and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, 2000.