Delhi Police have lodged complaint against multiple personalities over the Ghaziabad assault video. The names include actor Swara Bhaskar, Arfa Khanum Sherwani, Asif Khan of Twitter India and Manish Maheshwari, who is the Twitter India head.
The complaint was lodged by advocate Amit Acharya at Delhi’s Tilak Marg police station. Delhi Police has meanwhile launched a probe but an FIR is yet to be lodged over the fresh complaint.
Earlier, an FIR had named Twitter Inc, Twitter Communications India and news website The Wire, journalists Mohammed Zubair and Rana Ayyub, Congress leaders Shama Mohamed, Salman Nizami, Maskoor Usmani and writer Saba Naqvi in the same case.
Twitter and these prominent users have been booked for circulating a video in which an elderly Muslim man says he was thrashed and asked to chant “Jai Shri Ram”.
The FIR has said, “These people did not verify the truth of the matter and shared it online with a communal angle with an intention to disrupt public peace and create a divide between religious groups.”
The Press Club of India (PCI) has demanded that the FIR naming the journalists should be quashed because it shows “vendetta” by the Ghaziabad police to create a “sense of terror” in the media and society at large. “The PCI appeals to the government of UP to intervene in the matter at the earliest to ensure that journalists are not made easy targets of police high handedness by filing FIR against them,” it said in a statement.
In a video clip, which surfaced on social media on June 14, the elderly Muslim man, Abdul Shamad Saifi, is heard saying he was thrashed by some young men and asked to chant “Jai Shri Ram”.
The police denied the communal angle and said the accused were unhappy about a “tabeez” (amulet) he sold to them. Ghaziabad (Rural) Superintendent of Police Iras Raja said on Wednesday that three people — Kalloo Gurjar, Parvesh Gurjar and Adil — have been arrested for assaulting Saifi.