The Twitter Terrorist

The case of the Bangalore-based techie highlights the fast-spreading tentacles of jihad online

On 14 December, we had screaming front page newspaper headlines detailing the arrest of an executive with an infotech company in Bangalore. The 24-year-old Mehdi Masroor Biswas, his location and name first outed by British media outlet Channel 4 News, apparently owned a popular ISIS Twitter handle, @ShamiWitness, and was in touch with several ISIS fighters. He had over 17,700 followers and got about two million hits a month. The police claimed he could even be an ISIS recruiter, perhaps in touch with ISIS sleeper cells within India. The story was just too compelling—a young executive in India’s software capital by day, a radicalised terror spokesperson by night. And the news came while another Muslim youth, Areeb Majeed from Mumbai, was being interrogated for his role as a fighter for the ISIS. One report said that when the police reached Biswas’ house to arrest him, he opened the door and coolly informed them that he was indeed the one they were looking for. The press dished out all sorts of nuggets of information to show just how radicalised he was. One report pointed out how Biswas had retweeted the news of the beheading of a US aid worker by the ISIS five times.

But as it emerges, Biswas seems to be far from the online terror mastermind everyone made him out to be. For one, he was not in touch with ISIS fighters. He did not recruit anybody either. He hasn’t even ever travelled overseas. On the available information, he was just an impressionable young man with access to a computer, one who was perhaps carried away by the anonymity the web offers. His activities were limited to posting and re-posting pro-ISIS material. Biswas is originally from Kolkata. He lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Bangalore, with his parents occasionally visiting him. According to some media reports, he apparently called the reporters of Channel 4 News, who were posing as ISIS sympathisers. Later he did a two-minute long interview with the channel to ‘get them off his back’. The police then tracked him down.

One finds all sorts of material online. It is unfortunate but nonetheless easy, especially when one is young and impressionable, to get taken in by and then to begin to espouse the views one finds on the internet—as it appears to have happened in this case. If there are some ISIS fighters in the over 17,700 followers Biswas had (the police claim Majeed was following him), it doesn’t necessarily mean Biswas knew them. The Indian Government itself declared a ban on ISIS only recently, on 16 December.

The media, as it often happens, went over the top. The police, who were not even clued in to begin with, continue to track Biswas’ involvement with the group, sometimes to laughable extremes. The Karnataka Director General of Police LR Pachau, during the press conference announcing Biswas’ arrest, claimed that Biswas had taken a 60-GB monthly internet connection simply to tweet ISIS propaganda. The Twitter account itself, which was suspended after his identity was outed, is currently—at the time Open goes to press—operational. Strangely, the day after his arrest, a tweet went out from the account. It was spam directing people to a web service that archives one’s tweets. It turns out the police are using the Twitter handle. One can further gauge the competence of the police from a report in Mail Today, where when the police were asked about the tweet, they told the reporter they were using the account to not just study the tweets and keep a close watch on followers, but also to lure ISIS sympathisers by sending them direct messages from Biswas’ Twitter handle.

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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