Days after the Mumbai Police made three arrests in the case pertaining to the offensive app which targeted Muslim women, the Delhi Police on Thursday arrested a 20-year-old B.Tech. student for allegedly creating the application.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell Cyber Unit) K.P.S. Malhotra said the accused has been identified as Niraj Bishnoi, resident of Assam’s Jorhat and second year student of Vellore Institute of Technology in Bhopal.
“Special Cell has arrested the main conspirator and creator of the bullibai app on Github. With the arrest, the controversial Bulli Bai app case has been solved completely,” he said.
A senior police officer said help was sought from CERT-IN, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, an office within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of the Government of India.
“The raw data analysis — along with the technical details — was undertaken and the suspect was identified to be based in Jorhat Assam after which raids were conducted and Niraj was arrested,” the officer said.
The accused was brought to Delhi by air on Thursday afternoon after which he was interrogated.
During interrogation, sources said that he had disclosed he is the person who had created the Bullibai app on Github. “He had also created the twitter handle @bullibai_ and other handles. He further disclosed that Github account was developed in the month of November 2021 and finally updated the app in December 2021. The Twitter account was created on December 31. He further disclosed that he had also created one more twitter accounts @Sage0x1 for tweeting about the app,” the officer said.
Police said that Bishnoi was continuously monitoring the development of the case on social media and also tweeted that Mumbai Police had arrested the wrong person. “He had created one more Twitter account with the name of @giyu44 which he was using to comment on the case,” the officer said.
The Twitter handle that the police claim was being used by Bishnoi, had posted that two of the three people arrested by Mumbai Police were innocent because Bishnoi had used their accounts and they didn’t know what Bishnoi would do. “When this fiasco started I wasn’t even aware of what it might entail,” the Twitter handle posted, adding that he created Bulli Bai by cloning the Sulli Deals application.
Sources said that Niraj, so far, hasn’t been found involved in ‘Sulli Deals’ which the Special Cell has been probing since July 2020. When asked why police have not made any headway in Sulli Deals probe and are waiting for app hosting platform Github to share information on creator, a senior officer said “our technical analysis has been advanced this time”.
A Delhi-based journalist lodged a complaint that photos of Muslim women including herself were put on an application on ‘Bulli Bai’ and the women were auctioned.
“I hope the culprits behind this elaborate harassment of Muslim women, including journalists like myself, will ultimately be caught and punished so such a crime is not repeated with a sense of impunity again,” the journalist said after the arrest.
