Muzaffarnagar school incident: FIR filed against Alt News’s Md Zubair for disclosing minor’s identity
Zubair was one of the journalists who had posted the video of the incident on social media. However, he later deleted it.
2 min read
Alt News founder Mohammed Zubair. (File Photo) The Muzaffarnagar police Monday registered a case against fact-checking website Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair for allegedly disclosing the identity of a seven-year-old Muslim boy who was slapped by his classmates on the instructions of a school teacher.
The teacher, Tripta Tyagi (60), is also the owner of Neha Public School in Khubbapur village, where the incident took place on Thursday. The teacher had allegedly referred to the boy’s faith and talked pejoratively about “Mohammedan children” while she instigated other students to beat the boy “hard”. She has been booked under IPC sections 323 (causing hurt) and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace).
On Monday, an FIR was registered against Zubair, who was among those who had posted a video of the incident on social media and later deleted it, under Section 74 (prohibition on disclosure of identity of children) of the Juvenile Justice Act.
Reacting to the FIR, Zubair told The Indian Express, “I didn’t receive any notice or call from the police. It was through social media that I found that an FIR has been lodged against me. I was checking the FIR and it doesn’t have any other name. Why was only my name put there? There were several media outlets who posted the video before and after me. I later removed the video after I was told that I was disclosing the minor’s identity. This has happened with me before in 2020 as well. I was targeted…This shows police can target anyone.”
The FIR was filed on a complaint filed by a person identified as Vishnu Dutt. The FIR read: “On 25.8.2023 in Neha Public School Khubbapur case, a video went viral on social media. It has come to my notice that the identity of the victim child in the video was revealed by Mohammad Zubair, journalist of Alt News. This is a violation of the rights of the child under the Juvenile Justice Act, so it is requested to take appropriate legal action.”
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