In its attempt to tackle matters related to ISIS, the Mumbai police has stumbled upon a peculiar problem.
Within a year, the police received several tip–offs over the phone regarding people who allegedly work for ISIS but during investigates they realised that they were sent off on wild goose chases mostly to settle personal scores. Now, the police has decided to take strict action against such false informants, said sources from the police.
A police officer said on the condition of anonymity that recently the police received a call in which the person informed them about a suspected ISIS operative. “The caller said that he found a person’s activities suspicious and that the person always spoke against India. The caller also claimed that the person participates in chats over the Internet with ISIS sympathisers on his laptop. But when we verified the information, the man in question was a software engineer and his record was clean. Then we realised that the caller wanted to harass this person,” the officer said. He added that they have received 12 such calls and letters since December 2015.
“A few days ago, a person sent a written complaint about a Muslim kabab seller alleging that he has a connection with ISIS. The writer claimed he heard the kabab seller’s conversation with someone belonging to the terror organisation.” He further added, “But when we questioned the kabab seller we did not find anything that even remotely suggested that he has any link with ISIS. Later, we came to that the letter was written by a shop owner of the same area where the Kabab seller used to put his stall. The shop owner did not like the Kebab seller setting up his stall in front of his shop and so he wrote the letter to the police.”
Commenting on this, DCP crime branch Dhananjay Kulkarni said, “So far we have not registered any complaint against any person giving false information to settle a personal score. But now we have decided that we will take action against such persons for making statements conducing to public mischief.”
