A day after the Mumbai police apprehended a 21-year-old engineering student from Bengaluru in connection to the development of the contentious ‘Bulli Bai’ app, it has come to light that the main accused in the case is a woman.
While speaking to news agency ANI, the Mumbai police informed that the accused woman was detained from Uttarkhand. Initially, the police withheld the name of the 21-year-old, only to be revealed later as Vishal Kumar. The cops stated that the duo knew each other.
Reportedly, the woman was handling three Twitter accounts related to the controversial app. Kumar, on the contrary, created accounts in the name of Khalistanis and attributed the creation of the Bulli Bai to Khalsa account holders, as per reports. “On Dec 31, he changed the names of other accounts to resemble Sikh names. Fake Khalsa account holders were shown,” the cops said.
The main accused woman was handling three accounts related to ‘Bulli Bai’ app. Co-accused Vishal Kumar opened an account by the name Khalsa supremacist. On Dec 31, he changed the names of other accounts to resemble Sikh names. Fake Khalsa account holders were shown: Mumbai Police
— ANI (@ANI) January 4, 2022
Kumar was detained and brought to Mumbai on Monday (January 3) by the Mumbai police. The engineering student was one of the 5 people, who followed the Twitter handle of ‘Bulli Bai’. A First Information Report (FIR) was earlier lodged against the Twitter handles that promoted the app and those who developed it.
While speaking about the matter, a senior IPS officer had stated, “The 21-year-old is a second-year civil engineering student. He used his Twitter handle to share derogatory content from the Bulli Bai app. We have detained him.” He informed that the accused was traced using the IP address of his Twitter accounts, which was used to upload pictures.
The background of the ‘Bulli Bai’ case
Months after the controversial ‘Sulli Deals’ app, which had offered pics of Muslim women as ‘deals’, another such app has appeared on the open-source code repository Github. In the recent incident, photos of several Muslim women were misused and uploaded by an unidentified group on an app using GitHub by the name of ‘Bulli Bai’ on January 1.
The matter came to light after Ismat Ara, one of the female journalists at ‘The Wire’ became a ‘Bulli Bai’ target. She had shared on Twitter that her image is being ‘offered’ in the derogatory app.
It is pertinent to note that the ‘Bulli Bai’ Twitter account had a hashtag that read #FreeJaggiNow in its Twitter name, and its banner image also had the same hashtag. The Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw confirmed that the user behind its creation was blocked by the coding platform of GitHub.
