Hard to link Mehdi with Twitter handle @ShamiWitness: Investigating officers

Bengaluru: Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who was allegedly running the most influential Twitter account of the IS is a mystery to the investigating officers, who have huge task laid out before them, of verifying whether the twitter handle @ShamiWitness was indeed his.

Masroor had reportedly confessed to Channel 4 that he was operating the Twitter account @ShamiWitness, which had over 18,000 followers, two million viewers and two-thirds of all foreign fighters, who have allegedly joined the ISIS. But later in an interview with an Indian media he denied that @ShamiWitness was his Twitter handle.

The first task before the investing officers is to link him to the account, which is not going to be easy.

There are various tools like virtual private networks, which are available on the net to mask one’s IP address.

“He must have used a labyrinth and spoofed the geo-location to create the account. Sitting in Bengaluru, he must be showing his location in some other part of the world. It requires cyber forensic tools and international cooperation of agencies, which are involved in such investigation including Channel 4, which outed him. The case should be handed to the NIA, because it involves a cross-country apparatus,” an investigating official said.