Mohammed Zubair, Co-Founder of propaganda website AltNews, has been slapped with an FIR for harassing a minor girl online under the stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
On August 7, Mohammed Zubair had engage in a Twitter spat with a user named Jagdish Singh, where he targeted the latter’s granddaughter who was a minor girl.
The issue started when IPS officer Dipanshu Kabra posted a video of vehicles travelling on a bumpy road and asked to guess the city. The officer did not claim anything about the place. Zubair however assumed that the officer meant it to be a road in India and ran a fact check saying that the video was an old video of China.
Following this, a Twitter user Jagdish Singh posted “l*vde ka factchecker”, a term used for AltNews’ factchecking endeavour.
In response to this, Zubair used the display picture of Jagdish Singh in which he is with his granddaughter and tweeted “Hello Jagdish Singh, Does your cute grand daughter know about your part time job of abusing people of social media? I suggest you to change your profile pic.”
Following this, many Islamists descended on Zubairs tweet passing nefarious comments about the girl child.
Zubair’s action received widespread condemnation and was slammed for his irresponsible behaviour as he had put the girl child at risk by sharing the profile image of Jagdish.
Later, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights took cognizance of the matter and sent a communication to Twitter India and concerned law enforcement departments for appropriate action.
According to the ATR received in @NCPCR_ ,an FIR has been lodged against the alleged persons for threatening and torturing a girl child on @Twitter.
As per the request made by @TwitterIndia an additional time of 10 days has been provided to them to provide relevant information. pic.twitter.com/RLhXvzBUs8
— प्रियंक कानूनगो Priyank Kanoongo (@KanoongoPriyank) September 5, 2020
#Breaking FIR lodged against AltNews @AltNews co-founder Mohammed Zubair #zoo_bear upon @NCPCR_ orders; under stringent POCSO Act for online harassment of girl child. Father of victim girl had lodged complaint seeking action against him @KanoongoPriyank pic.twitter.com/15DzQYD3ie
— Legal Rights Observatory- LRO (@LegalLro) September 5, 2020
The father of the girl then lodged a police complaint seek action against Zubair. Now, an FIR under POCSO Act has been lodged against the perpetrator.