Bengaluru court convicts 'IS propagandist'

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: A decade after his arrest, Mehdi Masroor Biswas, an alleged supporter of a militant organisation, was convicted by a city court on charges of terrorism, waging war against an Asiatic ally and promoting enmity.

A Bengaluru special court for terrorism cases convicted Biswas on Tuesday on charges of terrorism under Sections 13, 18 and 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, which entail a maximum imprisonment of seven years.

The accused, now 34, was arrested when he was 24-year-old in Bengaluru on December 13, 2014.

Biswas's arrest came after the UK’s Channel 4 shared suspicion of him being the handler of the pro-Islamic State X account "@ShamiWitness" which was helping British IS recruits join ISIS (then Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) in Syria.

Biswas was an employee of the food manufacturing unit of a well-known Indian business group in 2014. He was nabbed in the city in a joint operation by the Bengaluru Central Crime Branch (CCB) police and the Internal Security Department.

The court has posted the hearing on sentencing in the case to January 19.

The special court has acquitted Biswas of charges of waging war against the government of India under Section 121 of the IPC and cyber terrorism under section 66F of the IT Act.

The special court has also kept in abeyance a verdict on charges of sedition under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code brought against Biswas by the police on account of a Supreme Court moratorium on use of the clause.

CCB had filed a charge sheet in 2015

Notably, the CCB police had filed a 36,986-page chargesheet against Biswas in June 2015.

Though Biswas was never physically associated with the Islamic State terrorist organisation, the probe revealed that he had accumulated knowledge regarding the outfit by spending hours aggregating data regarding radical Islamic activities in the middle east to disseminate information through the "@shamiwitness" handle.