Three people have been arrested so far in connection with the `Bulli Bai' app which targeted Muslim women by putting up their images online for `auction', Mumbai police said on January 5.
The police also claimed that the accused seemed to have used names related to the Sikh community in their Twitter handles which promoted the app in order to mislead people about their identity.
Shweta Singh, the 18-year-old woman arrested from Uttarakhand by the cyber cell of city police, was the prime accused who had created the Twitter handle of the app, said a senior police official here.
Ms. Singh, who has passed class 12 exam and was planning to pursue engineering, was acting on the instructions from one `Giyou' who was based in Nepal, he claimed.
Earlier in the day, Mumbai police commissioner Hemant Nagrale told reporters that some more people were likely to be involved in the matter.
Mayank Rawal, 21, was nabbed from Uttarakhand in the early hours of January 5 in the case. Shweta Singh was arrested on January 4 from Rudrapur in the same State, while engineering student Vishal Kumar Jha, 21, was held from Bengaluru on January 3.
"As per the status of the handle (linked to the app), it says Bulli Bai is a community driven open source app by Khalsa Sikh Force. So why this (alias) is there, that is part of our investigation," the commissioner said.
Mumbai Police registered a First Information Report after receiving a complaint about the app on January 2, following which investigators started technical analysis of the app and the related twitter handle, Mr. Nagrale said.
"During the technical analysis, we collected information about the followers of the app and launched a hunt for the accused," he said.
Bengaluru-based Vishal Kumar Jha, a second-year civil engineering student, was one of the five followers of the handle, Mr. Nagrale claimed.
If any person wants to share information about the case, he or she can contact Mumbai cyber police, he said.
Mr. Nagrale also expressed displeasure about comments made by some "local authorities" outside Maharashtra about the case, saying it was unwarranted as they did not have full information.
The Mumbai police commissioner, however, refused to comment when asked if the accused in the case were also involved in the 'Sulli Deals' case (where a similar website targeting Muslim women had been created). The latter case was being handled by Delhi Police, he said.
The app was hosted on the open-source software platform GitHub. It was later blocked by the platform. While there was no actual `auction' or `sale', the purpose of the app seemed to be to humiliate and intimidate the targeted women, many of whom are active social media users.
As per police officials, Shweta Singh, the alleged 18-year-old prime accused, had lost her father to COVID-19 and her mother to cancer.
A police release said that the use of names related to the Sikh community by the accused in their Twitter handles could have led to communal tension as the women who had been targeted belonged to another religion.
"Names related to the Sikh community were used to make it look like these Twitter handles had been created by persons from that community," it said.
The accused shared photos from the Bulli Bai app on Twitter by using handles like @bullibai_, @sage0x11, @jatkhalsa7, @wannabesigmaf, @jatkhalsa and @Sikh_khalsa11.
The information on the Twitter handle of the app claimed that its creator was "KSF Khalsa Sikh Force", while another Twitter handle, "Khalsa Supremacist", was its follower, the release said.
During the technical analysis, police found the involvement of Mr. Jha, a second year civil engineering student of Dayanand Sagar College of engineering, Bengaluru, it said.
The`Khalsa Supremacist' handle, allegedly used by Mr. Jha, mentioned the user's location as Canada, the release said.
A team of Mumbai cyber police including sub-inspectors Suyog Amrutkar, Amar Kamble and constable Deepak Patil arrested Shweta Singh and Mayank Rawal. The operation was supervised by senior inspector Sanjay Govilkar.
