Scribe held on fake news charge, portal owner says media gagged

Talking to The Indian Express, news portal owner and editor Ajay Prakash said the videos posted by them did not promote enmity and his employee was just doing his job. Calling it police brutality, he said the media was being oppressed.

According to a statement issued by the Pithoragarh police, Kishore was booked under Section 153 A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony) of the IPC and was later arrested after thorough investigation into the case.

“The man is not a journalist and has no identification to prove otherwise. He generally raises issues related to caste and we have found at least eight such cases where he raised issues by posting videos to extort money from people. Recently, he interviewed a Dalit man who alleged that two persons sexually assaulted his daughter and her cousin and posted the video, revealing his identity. In the video, he asked the man’s caste and made that an issue,” the SP said.

“When we came to know about this, we talked to the girls and they denied any such incident. We then talked to the father and he confessed that Kishore convinced him to make the allegations in exchange for Rs 3 lakh. We then found at least eight similar cases in which Kishore had spread fake news,” he added.

In the video, the man accused two men of luring his 15-year-old daughter and her 17-year-old cousin into their car on the pretext of taking them on a ride, but sexually assaulted them. He alleged that the two men dumped the girls on the Pithoragarh highway. Senior police officials claimed that they had not received any complaint in this regard and no FIR was registered.