Bulli Bai: 18-year-old alleged mastermind held in Uttarakhand

NEW DELHI: An 18-year-old girl, alleged to be the mastermind behind the 'Bulli Bai' app, was on Tuesday arrested by a Mumbai police team from Rudrapur in Uttarakhand's Udham Singh Nagar district.

Sweta Singh

, who has cleared her Class XII exams, was produced before an Uttarakhand court that put her on transit remand till January 5. "An additional team of the cyber cell arrived Tuesday night to take her to Mumbai," said Mamta Bohra, SP (city), Rudrapur.

The 'Bulli Bai' case was registered on January 1 following complaints that doctored photographs and other details of at least 100 prominent Muslim women were uploaded for 'auction' on the app hosted on the open-source software platform GitHub.

Singh, who was preparing for engineering entrance exams, had lost her father to Covid last year and mother to cancer in 2011. She is second among three sisters - both students. She also has a brother who is in class VIII. The siblings survive on the Rs 3,000 they receive from the Vatsalya Yojana launched for Covid orphans in Uttarakhand and Rs 10,000 from the solar manufacturing unit where their father was employed.

The cyber cell of Mumbai Police had on Monday arrested

Vishal Kumar Jha

(21), a second-year engineering student from Bengaluru, and brought him to Mumbai. Based on the information provided by him, the police team, led by sub-inspector

Suyog Amritkar

, arrested Singh from Uttarakhand.

"The motive behind Singh's act is unclear. During preliminary inquiry by Mumbai Police, she claimed to have created the fake account, jattkhalsa07, on the instructions from a social media friend,

Giyou

from Nepal. The fake account was used to post the contents on 'Bulli Bai' app," said

Senthil A Krishna Raj

, DIG, Uttarakhand police headquarters.

"Singh was in touch with Jha," claimed Bohra.

"She was connected with people behind the website for the past six months. They follow the same ideology that has led to this hate crime. She was continuously posting hate comments. Her handle on Twitter, jattkhalsa07, was involved in the crime of posting with wrong intentions objectionable photos of several celebrities and social media activists."

On Tuesday,

Jha

from Bihar, was produced before the Bandra court, which remanded him in police custody till January 10. The court also granted permission to carry out searches at Jha's room near his college in Bengaluru. Jha's lawyer

Dinesh Prajapati

told TOI that his client has been falsely implicated in the case. He also denied that Jha knew Singh.

The college authorities told TOI that Jha had called the institution on Monday, stating that the police had been calling him and he had "not done anything wrong". "Jha loaded objectionable pictures using his mobile and laptop. It looks like he is not the creator of the 'Bulli Bai' app. He has been uploading pictures of women from Muslim community and editing them," a senior IPS officer from Bengaluru said. "We were not aware of the case until police announced his arrest in Mumbai on Tuesday. On Monday, Mumbai police approached us saying they have come to detain a student in a cybercrime case." On Monday, Maharashtra MoS for home and information technology Satej Patil had tweeted: "There seems to be a much bigger network behind such coordinated crimes and I am confident that Mumbai police will soon unearth the entire nexus that is enabling such hate crimes against women in our country."

Mumbai Police have registered a case under sections 153A (promoting disharmony), 153B (publishing wrong appeal), 295A (defiling place of worship), 509 (insult to modesty of women), 500 (defamation), and 453D (stalking) of the IPC and relevant sections of the IT Act.