Journalism of Courage
Arrested trio could be involved with earlier app too: cops to court
🔴 Police said this while opposing the bail application of the three accused before the Bandra Magistrate court. The court heard the arguments by lawyers of the three accused and posted the matter for Tuesday when it is likely to pass on order on the bail applications.
THE MUMBAI police on Monday told a local court that based on their prima facie investigation, it appears that the three accused arrested by them in a hate app case were also involved in a similar, earlier app. The earlier app was operational on the open-source platform Github till July 2021, and also targeted Muslim women.
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Police said this while opposing the bail application of the three accused before the Bandra Magistrate court. The court heard the arguments by lawyers of the three accused and posted the matter for Tuesday when it is likely to pass on order on the bail applications.
Shweta Singh (18), Mayank Rawat (21) and Vishal Jha (21) are the three accused arrested by the Mumbai police in connection with the hate app case. Earlier, Jha and Rawat tested positive for Covid-19 and were being treated at a Covid care centre in the Kalina area.
Opposing their bail application, the Mumbai police also said the trio were in touch with each other through Twitter and Instagram groups. They used VPN accounts which showed their location to be outside the country.
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The police said that Twitter had, in the past, deleted social media accounts used by the three accused over some of the content posted by them. Claiming that the accused used Twitter handles with Sikh names to target Muslim women, the police said theywere trying to find out the reason behind the same.
Arguing for Jha, advocate Shivam Deshmukh said he had not created the app and his role was limited to only using Twitter handles connected to the app.
He further argued that his client had no criminal antecedents.
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