Youth held in TN for sending provocative SMSes

A 20-year old youth has been nabbed by the police in Coimbatore for “forwarding” provocative SMSes that warned the people from North East of retaliatory attacks, in the wake of recent ethnic clashes in Assam.

The youth, Mohammed Sheikh Hassain, on a tip-off from one of the receivers of such provocative SMS, was held by the Coimbatore Police and remanded to 15-day judicial custody in the Pollachi sub-jail late on Saturday night, police sources in Coimbatore told Deccan Herald.

Hassain, working in a garment unit at a predominantly Muslim settlement in Coimbatore, had allegedly been forwarding such “provocative” messages from his cell phone “unmindful of its havoc potential”, police said, adding, they cracked down on the youth with technical assistance of the cyber crime cell. When the police rounded up the youth, they also found the message stored on his mobile phone.

Though Hassain claimed he was “merely re-sending” the messages which did not say anything about its authorship, police said even “forwarding” such text messages was a criminal offence. Meanwhile, the origin of that SMS text message was also being investigated.

Meanwhile, the North East community continued to board trains to their native places en masse on Sunday from different parts of Tamil Nadu including Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Erode and Salem. The numbers, however, have shown a dip compared to the first two days since the outbreak.