Jabalpur Inspector General (IG) Srinivas Rao has denied reports that three Jabalpur youths have been detained to probe their alleged interaction with ISIS Twitter account @ShamiWitness, allegedly owned by Mehdi Masroor Biswas.
"Some other agency must (be) working on it...not us," The Times of India quoted Rao as saying. He added that the "detentions" could be just a rumour.
Madhya Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad (MPATS) chief Sanjeev Shami also said that no one has been arrested in connection with the @ShamiWitness case.
However, reports indicate that MPATS and Counter Terrorist Group (CTG) have indeed detained three youths from Rampur Patel Mohalla in Jabalpur district on Wednesday night.
The three Twitter followers of @ShamiWitness have alllegedly been taken into custody for interrogations for retweeting some of the sensitive tweets from Mehdi's ISIS Twitter account, according to TOI sources.
Also, around 50 'objectionable' emails from the trio were recovered from Mehdi's email account, which were then used by Bengaluru police to trace their computers in Jabalpur.
The TOI sources said that the trio are being grilled and will be released only after scanning the contents of their emails.
Meanwhile, the police is scanning over a lakh replies to Mehdi's tweets on @ShamiWitness account. They have also asked Twitter to provide all information along with deleted messages and replies from the data bank of the account.
They are also looking into the profiles of 17,700 followers of Mehdi's ISIS account to find out if they are in anyway related to any jihadi outfits Islamic State.
Mehdi was arrested last week from his house in Bengaluru's Jalahalli area. He has been booked under Section 66F of Information Technology Act, 2000 for "cyber terrorism." If proved guilty, Mehdi can face life imprisonment.
However, both his father N Masroor Biswas and mother Mumtaz Begum believe their son is innocent and has been framed, either by Mehdi's enemies or his enemies.
His parents live in Kolkata while Mehdi shifted to Bengaluru after he joined FMCG company ITC in 2012.
