A three-member Mumbai Cyber Police team arrested him from Kotdwar in Pauri Garhwal district. Rawat’s father is in the army and posted in Jammu, a police officer in Pauri Garhwal said on condition of anonymity.
The Mumbai cyber police arrested one more student - 21-year-old Mayank Rawal - from Uttarakhand in connection with the ‘Bulli Bai’ app case. Mumbai police had earlier arrested Shweta Singh (18), alleged to be the main culprit, from Uttarakhand, and engineering student Vishal Kumar Jha (21) from Bengaluru in connection with the case.
The Mumbai Police late on Tuesday arrested a third accused from Uttarakhand in connection with the web pages that put hundreds of Muslim women on “auction” and provoked outrage, people aware of the matter said on Wednesday.
A three-member Mumbai Cyber Police team arrested him from Kotdwar in Pauri Garhwal district. Rawat’s father is in the army and posted in Jammu, a police officer in Pauri Garhwal said on condition of anonymity. He added Rawat was pursuing his BSc in chemistry (honours) from Delhi University’s Zakir Hussain College. “He was home in Kotdwar because of offline classes.”
Police had that said both the accused know each other and were running the fake accounts on the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. The police have taken the accused in custody till January 10.
Also read: No Nikah if it involves music, dance and DJ in Kashmir Valley's Mankote
“The main accused woman was handling three accounts related to the 'Bulli Bai' app. Co-accused Vishal Kumar opened an account by the name Khalsa supremacist. On Dec 31, he changed the names of other accounts to resemble Sikh names. Fake Khalsa account holders were shown,” Mumbai Police was quoted by ANI.
Mumbai Police are probing two web pages hosted on the code-sharing platform, GitHub. The first web page was floated in July 2021 and the second, Bulli Bai, surfaced on January 1.
The Mumbai police had registered a First Information Report (FIR) against unidentified persons following complaints that doctored photographs of hundreds of Muslim women were uploaded for ‘auction' along with their photographs sourced without permission and doctored on the app. 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 vocal Muslim women who are active social media users.
Jha was arrested first in Bengaluru for allegedly running one of the Twitter handles used to upload links to the websites. Singh, the second accused to be arrested, was deeply involved in Hindutva ideology and often posted such content on social media, said a police officer with knowledge of the matter.