The Mumbai police’s crime branch on Thursday arrested a 28-year-old man in connection with the Bulli Bai case, a senior official said. The Mumbai police also took custody of the alleged mastermind behind the app which targeted Muslim women by posting their pictures in a mock-auction , Niraj Bishnoi, who was arrested by Delhi Police. So far, five people have been arrested in the hate- and sex-crime.
The fourth accused, identified as Neeraj Singh, who has an MBA degree, was arrested by the cyber police of Mumbai Crime branch from Odisha. Cyber police officials said Singh was involved in the conceptualisation of the app with Bishnoi.
Police officials in Odisha’s Jharsuguda said Singh is a resident of Lamtibahal area of the colliery town of Brajarajnagar in Jharsuguda. “He was part of a WhatsApp group where he chatted with the makers of the Bulli bai app,” said Nirmal Mohapatra, sub-divisional police officer of Jharsuguda.
The team from Mumbai CID took Neeraj Singh on a six-day remand after producing him before a local court on Thursday afternoon, he added.
Deputy commissioner of police (Cyber) Rashmi Karandikar said Singh was arrested after details of his involvement surfaced during the investigation.
His brother Nikesh Singh said his brother did not create the app and only chatted with the makers of the app. “He is innocent,” said Nikesh, who works in a colliery unit in the town.
The Bulli Bai app was uploaded on open source host platform GitHub on December 31, the police said, adding that the content of the app was promoted on Twitter on January 1. According to police, morphed images of more than 100 Muslim women, including journalists, were published online. The content of the app was taken off online platforms by authorities after it attracted widespread criticism from various quarters.
During Bishnoi’s interrogation by Delhi Police’s special cell, he pointed them in the direction of Aumkareshwar Thakur, a resident of Newyork city in Madhya Pradesh, who, he claimed, was the person behind Sulli Deals, a similar app that appeared on GitHub in July last year, and from where he claimed to have borrowed much of the code.
The Mumbai police registered a first information report (FIR) against unidentified persons onJanuary 2. The breakthrough in the case came when the Mumbai police on January 4 arrested 21-year-old Vishal Jha, a second-year engineering student from Bengaluru, in connection with the Bulli Bai app. Following his arrest, two Uttarakhand residents , 18-year-old Shweta Singh, a HSC pass out, and 20-year-old Mayank Rawat, a BSC student, were also arrested on January 4 and 5. All three are currently in judicial custody. Jha is lodged in Mumbai’s Arthur Road central prison, Shweta Singh in Byculla women’s prison while Rawat is quarantined in a Covid care centre in Kalina after he tested Covid-19 positive last week, police said.
The three accused circulated the content of the app on Twitter on the instructions of the alleged mastermind, 21-year-old Bishnoi, who was using the alias ‘Giyu’ for online activities. Bishnoi, a second-year engineering student of Vellore Institute of Technology, Bhopal, was arrested in Assam by the Delhi police Special Cell’s IFSO unit on January 6. He has been suspended by his college. It isn’t clear whether he was operating on his own, or was part of a larger network.
The accused have claimed they were falsely implicated in the case.
The Mumbai crime branch on Thursday also took custody of 26-year-old Thakur. Both Bishnoi and Thakur were brought to Mumbai, where the Bandra metropolitan magistrate court remanded them to police custody till January 27.
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