An uneasy calm reigned over Kaval Byrasandra in northern Bengaluru as two police cars pulled in around 1.20 pm on Thursday.
One of them stopped right in front of a three-storeyed corner house. The cops — some wearing khaki but many in plainclothes — got off quickly to usher a short, lean man into the building. The man wore a T-shirt, jeans and sports shoes, topped with a baseball cap and a facemask. He was Mohammed Zubair, the 40-year-old co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News who was arrested by the Delhi police on June 27 for tweeting a still from the 1983 Hindi film Kissi Se Na Kehna four years ago.
The prosecution's case, based on a complaint from a Twitter handle that has since been deleted, is that Zubair "hurt" religious sentiments. A magistrate in Delhi allowed the police to question Zubair in custody for four days and recover from his Bengaluru home the laptop/mobile phone used to post the said tweet.
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Accordingly, Delhi police flew into Bengaluru with Zubair around 11.30 am. Thereafter, with help from Bengaluru's DJ Halli police, they drove to Zubair's residence. He was straightaway taken to the first-floor house where the cops spent nearly two hours scouring the laptop that he used for work. At 3.04 pm, he was taken to the ground floor where he has set up a small office for Alt News. The police team left with him at 4.05 pm after confiscating the laptop. The cops didn't take questions from reporters and headed back to Delhi.
Sources in the know said the police didn't question Zubair's wife and a younger brother who were present at the house nor did they accept the refreshments offered to them by the family.
Zubair's custody ends on July 2. The Delhi High Court is due to hear his application against the police custody on Friday.
In a Twitter post on Thursday evening, Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News, wondered why the Delhi police had to go all the way to Bengaluru to get Zubair's laptop, "a device which has nothing to do with the tweet". According to Sinha, Zubair had posted the said tweet from a phone which was snatched from him in 2021 and for which he'd produced a copy of the police complaint.
"For a tweet, why does Delhi police need to find the original device? They can see the tweet even on their own phones or summon Twitter for details. It is clear that the Delhi police is on a desperate fishing expedition. The act of seizing the device is for purposes beyond this case," he wrote.
Zubair, a telecom engineering graduate from Bengaluru's Ramaiah Institute of Technology, came to the limelight after highlighting the controversial remark made by BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma that almost led to a diplomatic crisis between India and many Muslim-majority countries.
Relatives and friends described Zubair as a shy, unassuming person. "If you talk to him, you wouldn't get the feeling that this is a man who busts fake news on a daily basis," a cousin said on the condition of anonymity.