A team of Mumbai police apprehended a 21-year-old engineering student from Bengaluru in Karnataka in connection to the creation of the contentious ‘Bulli Bai’ app, as per reports. The app allegedly ‘auctioned’ pictures of female journalists and activists and had derogatory content targeted against Muslim women.
As per reports, the accused was brought to Mumbai on Monday (January 3). 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 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 cops are now questioning the accused about his involvement in the creation of the app.
‘Bulli Bai’ app case : Mumbai Police has not revealed the identity of the suspect detained from Bengaluru yet, except for his age. Police have registered a case against unknown culprits under relevant sections of IPC and the IT Act.
— ANI (@ANI) January 3, 2022
Interestingly, the police have refused to divulge details about the accused other than his age and educational background. Minister of State for Home (Urban) Satej D Patil informed, “MumbaiPolice has got a breakthrough. Though we cannot disclose the details at this moment as it may hamper the ongoing investigation, I would like to assure all the victims that we are proactively chasing the culprits & they will face the law very soon.”
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 hundreds of Muslim women were misused and uploaded by an unidentified group on an app using GitHub by the name of ‘Bulli Bai’ on January 1.
While the culprits behind the Sulli Deals were never caught and their identity never revealed, the people behind the Bulli Bai app are self-proclaimed supporters of the Khalistani movement, and demand the release of arrested Khalistani terrorists. 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.
