Mehdi Biswas, ISIS's Voice on Twitter, Wanted To Be a Strategist
Other Related News:
‘@ShamiWitness’ an Analyst On Syria’
Mehdi Was Close To English-Speaking ISIS Terrorists
Britain’s MI6 Helps India Home in on Mehdi
He Knew the Quran by Heart, Often Gave Us Lessons: Mehdi’s Parents
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By Arun Dev
Dec 14, 2014
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BENGALURU: A genius clouded and confused by fanaticism. That's how officers who arrested and interrogated Mehdi Biswas described him. A man who carefully kept his real and virtual lives apart.
He didn't want to be a foot soldier but wanted to be in the top layer, as a strategist. He was drawn to religion since his college days and soon became deep-rooted in extremist ideas. He spent most of his time reading, mostly about the Levantine region comprising countries like Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Turkey. "Even though he hadn't visited any of these countries, he had in-depth knowledge of this area," said Hemanth Nimbalkar, joint commissioner of police, (crime).
He believed in the idea of an Islamic state and when asked why he didn't strive for it in India, he said India had no real Muslims capable of jihad.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a researcher of jihadi groups and blogger, who had written about Mehdi called him a cheerleader for Isis. "One could term him a 'recruiter' in the sense that his relentless tweeting contributed to a wider atmosphere of online narrative furtherance for Isis that might provide some motivation for someone to join it," he said in an email conversation. He was highly influential in the Isis support network because of his ability to translate from Arabic to English.
He added that in the fight against Isis, perhaps government agencies found him useful as an 'inadvertent honey pot' to track the accounts of would-be recruits reaching out to him via Twitter or email asking how to join Isis.
Offline, he led a quiet life. His landlord Srinivasaiah reveals about Mehdi's other life. "He met me in 2012 and said he'd got a job in the city. He wanted a one-room apartment. A few months ago, he moved from the second floor to the first," he said.
Mehdi hardly spoke to neighbours and his parents visited him a couple of times over two years. Mehdi had two or three friends but spent time alone at home. He didn't own any vehicle, preferred walking to office and often ate at eatery nearby. On his few forays outside, he'd buy chicken dishes from the neighbourhood hotelier.
A quiet life which effectively concealed a different online persona.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Mehdi-Biswas-ISISs-voice-on-Twitter-wanted-to-be-a-strategist/articleshow/45508617.cms
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‘@ShamiWitness’ an Analyst on Syria’
Dec 14, 2014
The identity of the owner of the Twitter handle ‘@ShamiWitness’ has been exposed as that of a Bengaluru engineer only now, but for quite some time, he has been seen as an expert on the goings-on in Syria.
Going by the comments he has given to those who have sought his views, Mehdi Masroor Biswas is quite wise and knowledgeable for his 24 years. Information available about this tweeter suggests that he is considered an analyst on Syria and has been quoted pseudonymously by western media and is a contributor to blogs on jihad.
Writing in www.businessinsider.com in January 2014, Michael B. Kelley, an American journalist, described ‘@ShamiWitness’ as a civilian tweeting about Syria since at least November 2011. “Shami regularly interacts with some of the foremost experts of the increasingly complex conflict, and his access to and understanding of what’s happening on the ground makes him a useful source of information.” Mr. Kelley says he became acquainted with Shami on Twitter in early 2012 and that they followed each other and their interactions were mostly amicable.
Shami was quoted by The Telegraph and The Daily Mail after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an organisation that worked with the Assad regime in Syria to remove 1,300 tonnes of chemical weapons. Mehdi has received support from pro-IS twitter handles. A hashtag #FreeShamiWitness has been created. The tweets demanding his release suggest he is seen as a disseminator of information by his followers. “He isnt’ a poor guy.. he is a Truthful Media Hero, a freedom of rights analyst.. We are & All Media should be Proud of Him,” said a tweet by @IS_WorldPress.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/shami-an-analyst-on-syria/article6689402.ece
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Mehdi Was Close To English-Speaking ISIS Terrorists
Dec 14, 2014
NEW DELHI: Police on Saturday arrested a company executive suspected of operating a pro-Islamic State Twitter account that pumped out a stream of updates on the violent group's military campaign from his base in Bengaluru.
Mehdi Masroor Biswas's arrest at home came days after Britain's Channel Four identified him as the man behind "Shami Witness", the Twitter handle followed by thousands of people including most foreign fighters for the Islamic State.
Police said the 24-year-old used to post Twitter messages after office hours, cheering the Islamic State's advances in Iraq and Syria, and mocking its enemies.
"He was particularly close to the English-speaking terrorists of ISIS and became a source of incitement and information for the new recruits trying to join ISIS/ISIL," police commissioner M N Reddi told reporters.
Police have "registered a case" against him for abetting war against the state. But Mehdi's father told Times Now Channel that his son was innocent and had been framed.
"My son is not linked to any jihadi group," his father told the channel.
India has the world's third-largest Muslim population, but police say only four men are known to have flown to the Middle East to fight for the Islamic State. One has since returned and is in police custody.
But officials say it is hard to track the number of sympathisers of the Islamic State's ideology as there is no central figure or recruiting authority.
Mehdi told Channel 4 in an interview this week that he would have liked to join the Islamic State but for his family who were dependent on him
He regularly shared jokes, funny images and talked about superhero movies on his Facebook page, posting pictures of pizza dinners with friends and Hawaiian parties at work, the British channel said.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Mehdi-was-close-to-English-speaking-ISIS-terrorists-Bengaluru-police-commissioner/articleshow/45505712.cms
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Britain’s MI6 Helps India Home in on Mehdi
Dec 14, 2014
A globally coordinated effort with British and Indian intelligence agencies coming together with Bangalore City Police led to the swift arrest of 24-year-old Mehdi Masroor Biswas, the alleged owner of the pro-IS Twitter account @ShamiWitness early on Saturday.
Biswas, an engineering graduate from Kolkata and working as a manufacturing executive at ITC Foods in the city since 2012, was picked up from his one-room flat at Jalahalli in the city’s north-eastern part. The arrest came just hours after he established contact on his mobile phone with Channel 4 representatives for the second time.
Sources say all telephone call traffic between Bengaluru and London was being monitored since Friday, after Channel 4 broadcast the first interview that unmasked his identity. Officials said the operation had MI6, the British intelligence agency, passing information to their Indian counterparts. A Bengaluru Police official said that once they had Mehdi’s mobile number, it was easy to track him down.
The police have now booked cases against Mehdi under Section 125 of Indian Penal Code for waging war against an Asian power that is in alliance with India (in this case Syria), Sections 18 and 39 of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 2012, and Section 66-F of the Information Technology Act for cyber terrorism. At a press conference on Saturday, Police Commissioner M.N. Reddi said: “Through his social media propaganda, he abetted IS in its agenda to wage war against Asian powers.”
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/proisis-twitter-account-handler-detained-in-bengaluru/article6689357.ece
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He Knew the Quran by Heart, Often Gave Us Lessons: Mehdi’s Parents
Dec 14, 2014
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“I feared the worst when our son stopped responding to calls shortly after 1 am on Saturday. When we spoke last, he told us the Bangalore Police might come any moment,” Dr Mekail Biswas, father of Mehdi Masroor Biswas, said on Saturday.
In the past 12 hours, the world of Dr Biswas and his wife Mumtaz Biswas has been turned upside down, perhaps forever. Masroor, a manufacturing executive for a multinational conglomerate based in Bangalore, was arrested on Saturday after Britain’s Channel 4 revealed him as the individual behind the pro-IS Twitter handle @ShamiWitness.
The Indian Express tracked down the Biswases on Friday night, and soon after the newspaper became available on Saturday morning, reporters from print publications and television channels descended on the family’s home in Kaikhali near Dum Dum airport. It is from them that the couple learnt that their son had been arrested.
“We were totally in the dark about our son’s alleged activities, for which he has been arrested… We are hoping to leave for Bangalore as early as possible, but we fear that his flat will now be out of bounds. Who will accommodate the parents of a man branded a terrorist?” Dr Biswas, a 64-year-old retired assistant engineer of the West Bengal State Electricity Board who now practises as a homoeopathic doctor, told The Sunday Express.
Sources in central police agencies which have been working on the background of Masroor said on Saturday that according to their findings, Masroor was a “self motivated preacher for Islam and apparently had no mentors”.
From an analysis of the tweets allegedly posted by him on @ShamiWitness, investigators have got a preliminary impression that Masroor was “basically doing a copy-paste operation, mostly repeating stuff that had surfaced on several forums of the IS”.
These investigators said that while there was no doubt about the strong Islamic moorings of Masroor, no concrete evidence had emerged so far to link him to jihadi activities.
Sitting in their home north of Kolkata, Masroor’s parents appeared clueless about their son’s online identity — it seemed inconceivable to them that their well-behaved, timid, God-fearing son who liked to confine himself to his home at most times could be an aggressive jihadist propagandist who lauded the IS’s barbaric beheadings in the virtual world. The Internet is largely an alien world to them, the couple said.
“Our son is a devout Muslim,” Dr Biswas said. “He had learnt the Quran Sharif by heart, and would often give me and my wife lessons from the Holy Book. He did not know Arabic; he had learnt the English version of the Quran.”
Masroor never went to a madrasa or religious teacher, Dr Biswas said. “He studied in English-medium schools all through, and was a middling student. He passed his Madhyamik examination from Indira Gandhi School in Kaikhali, and did his Higher Secondary from Kendriya Vidyalaya near the Dum Dum Ordnance Factory.”
The parents did confirm that their son appeared obsessed with his laptop. “On vacation, he would spend hours on it. At times he would burst out laughing while watching something on his laptop. But he never told us exactly what he was watching.”
Masroor was a shy boy and an introvert, Dr Biswas said. In Bangalore, he intially stayed as a paying guest, sharing his quarters with three or four others. He had moved out later, apparently because he could not reconcile to the fact that his roommates consumed alcohol.
“Food in Bangalore for a Bengali boy was a problem. He was not used to South Indian food. So his mother stayed with him over lengths of time,” Dr Biswas said.
It was only on November 26, in fact, that Masroor’s parents had returned to Kolkata after spending several weeks with him. Masroor, they said, had sat for the CAT, and hoped to do an MBA.
Biman Nagar, the Kaikhali neighbourhood where the Biswases live, is still relatively new, and gets its name from its proximity to the airport, ‘biman-bandar’ in Bengali. Dr Biswas and his wife were one of the early residents. A portion of their three-storey house has been put on rent.
The neighbourhood has a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims. Not being settled for long, its residents don’t know each other very well. Muslims knew Dr Biswas as a homoeopath. The family’s ancestral home is in Baduria in Basirhat, about 80 km away.
“You can check our background with the local police station,” Dr Biswas said. He had apparently got to know the local police after a dispute over erecting a mobile phone tower on his roof — the family’s neighbours had objected, fearing radioactive emissions. The tower was not erected ultimately.
Source: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/crime/he-knew-the-quran-by-heart-often-gave-us-lessons-parents/99/#sthash.V8yRfIgg.dpuf
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/mehdi-biswas,-isis-voice-twitter,/d/100476