ISIS' Twitter 'jihadi' has Bengali antecedents, believes senior linguistic expert

Bengaluru: This is the nightmare scenario — a young Indian Muslim committed to jihad recruiting for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Or worse still, IS, planting a deep asset in tech capital Bengaluru, to recruit educated Muslim youth to the cause of jihad.

Crime branch of the city police says it has launched a probe to verify the shocking British media report that claimed the man behind the most influential pro-Islamic State Twitter account followed by foreign jihadis — mainly from the UK —  is from the IT city.

The pro-ISIS twitter handle goes by the improbable moniker of Mehdi Masroor Biswas. 

Top police officials revealed to this newspaper that the police have had an eye on @Shami Witness for over a year now, and strongly believe he is a techie, employed at Manyata Tech Park, Kempapura in Hebbal.

Intelligence bureau officials are in the process of probing the antecedents of Mehdi from the corporate office based in the city.

Sources have also told this newspaper that a senior linguistic expert, studying the speech pattern of an interview conducted by the British news broadcaster ‘Channel 4’ with the man operating the account strongly believe he has Bengali antecedents.

Sources said Mehdi Masroor Biswas is a fake identity and there is no person by this actual name in Bengaluru. “There is no data on this man in any of the service providers’ records. If he was in the City, he should have had an address, a contact number and a driver’s license. His name doesn’t figure in any of the records. It’s a pseudonym,” said a highly placed source.

The man operating the account " has until now been able to remain anonymous, avoiding questions about his motives and his central role in the Islamic State's propaganda war," the report by the British media house claimed.

"Today, we can reveal that tweets, written under the name Shami Witness, were seen two million times each month, making him perhaps the most influential Islamic State Twitter account, with over 17,700 followers," it said.

Mehdi who came down to the city in 2011, reportedly found employment and started operating Twitter accounts that supported and sympathised with IS activities in Iraq.

And soon as the ISIS was formed, Mehdi shifted his loyalty to ISIS, posted and uploaded his views and opinions about ISIS and also offered a platform for like-minded sympathisers for their views and opinions.

During the interview, he reportedly justified gruesome violence by the IS including executions and beheading.

On a question whether he was an honest Muslim, he fumbled and said, “I try to. But I am not sure if I am,” he added. He said that he wanted to join the ISIS but stayed back because of his parents, who were dependent on him. Mehdi declined that he was an ISIS recruiter and said that there were real reasons for people to get “radicalised.”