NEW DELHI: The Twitter profile of “ShamiWitness” had a portrait of Khalid Ibn Al Walid, who was the army commander of the “Army of the Prophet Mohammed” and the subsequent Khalifas. It was not an ordinary Twitter account. Followed by active fighters and commanders of ISIS also known as ISIL or Daesh, it was an account that reported things as they were happening in Iraq and Syria about how the terrorist organization was killing people, not before torturing them and how it was spreading across the world.
At the time, ISIS was at its peak and intelligence and security agencies around the world were worried how ISIS would strike them and where.
ShamiWitness had developed as the one stop source of information for journalists across the world who wanted to know what the situation on the ground was, as it was assumed that he was a high-ranking ISIS commander who was sharing information from the ground. When journalists would reach out to him through Twitter Direct messages, including this reporter, with a query or seeking confirmation, he would already have the sought information and in cases where he did not have the information, he would come back with one.
The account, it seemed, was being operated by someone who was putting out content right from Raqqa, Syria, the de facto Caliphate of ISIS or from Mosul in Iraq, much of which was under the control of ISIS.
Who was ShamiWitness? How close was he to the now slain chief of Al Baghdadi? Did the “polite” ShamiWitness travel from one place to the other with Baghdadi? How close was he to Baghdadi? Was he one of the sons of Baghdadi? No one knew answers to these questions at that time.
However, things were going to change.
On one winter morning of 13 December 2014, India and the entire world woke up to the startling fact that the person who was running “ShamiWitness”, the most prominent anonymous voice of ISIS, was an Indian national of barely 24 years of age. And he was not tweeting from Raqqa, but mostly from his rented house in Bengaluru or from his office premises of ITC while using an Acer laptop or a Nokia 6300 mobile phone.
For the first time, The Sunday Guardian, on the basis of unreleased documents, testimonies and court records related to this case, is bringing out the story behind the man who, when ISIS was at its peak, was accorded the status of the unofficial primary spokesperson of the terror group which had gained prominence with the gory torture and execution videos of its prisoners that it would release, some of which were “exclusively” shared by ShamiWitness.
The name of said individual was Mehdi Masroor Biswas who was arrested in the second week of December 2014 from a nondescript building situated at S.M. Road, Jalahalli West, Bengaluru.
Ten years after his arrest, Masroor, now given the identity of Convict No. 52, will walk out from Bengaluru Central Prison in December first week after a Bengaluru court had sentenced him to 10 years of prison in January this year.
By the time the order was pronounced, he had already been an undertrial for more than nine years.
Masoor was born in Howrah in West Bengal and did his primary and secondary schooling from private schools in Kalighat, Dum Dum and then finally completed his 12th CBSE from Kendriya Vidyalaya in science stream in 2008.
After he got the 9026th rank in West Bengal JEE, he enrolled in B.Tech in Guru Nanak Institute of Technology, Panihati, North 24 Parganas, West Bengal and passed out in 2012 with 7.44 CGPA, following which he was placed in ITC Limited Foods Division in June 2012 campus placement in Bangalore (as it was at the time).
However, his curiosity with the jihadi environment had pushed him to explore this dangerous and captivating world in May 2009. The initial world that attracted him to this was when he started visiting online jihadi forums, where he started interacting with individuals from Chechnya, Somalia, the United States who were already stuck in this intoxicating world of religious fanaticism.
Soon he was engrossed in reading books that promoted violent jihad but because he was not adept in understanding Arabic, and most of the content had to be translated and then shared on these forums, which had slow bandwidth speed, he grew aloof towards these forums.
In March or April 2013, he changed his already existing Twitter id “Elslatador”, which he had created in the summer of 2009, to ShamiWitness. The email that he used to access the said Twitter account, “elsaltador@gmail.com” was created when he was in Class VIII.
As things unravelled, it is this email that would lead to his identification and subsequent arrest by Bengaluru police.
Later, he started accessing this account through another email address, stromrider90x@yandex.com
It was in the starting of 2013 that Masroor, who had been active on Twitter since the late 2010 and had by then become a recognizable handle for those who were following the events in Syria and Iraq, that he got majorly into a pro-ISIS mode and started translating content from Arabic into English that got him more eyeballs.
By August 2013, his tweets were being picked up by international human rights agencies including Human Rights Watch. His tweets on the chemical attack carried out by the Assad government in Damascus went viral and were also used by a prominent UK newspaper on its report on Organization for Prevention of Chemical Weapons that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October.
Masroor, an engineering graduate from West Bengal, working as a management trainee in Bengaluru, not even one year into his first job, had silently transformed into one of the pro-ISIS global voices followed by global anti-terror experts, members of think tanks, and of course journalists.
Investigations, backed by documented proof, showed that two-thirds of all foreign fighters who joined ISIS were following him. When the Twitter account of an ISIS fighter was suspended, Masroor would promote the new one and urged people to follow it. Mehdi spoke to British jihadis regularly before they left to join ISIS and after they arrived, and if they died, he praised them as martyrs. His updates from ISIS frontlines and constant interactions with the faces of ISIS ensured that he was getting two million hits (views) on his page every month.
He, as investigations revealed, was regularly interacting with 48 accounts of ISIS fighters. He was also in direct one to one contact with prominent ISIS commanders and fighters, as he would reveal later along with their names and details of his conversation.
In August 2014, Masroor had got “bored” of his activities and was getting questions from his followers that he was not putting out any new information.
Around the same time, a UK based newspaper announced that “ShamiWitness” was one of the most important disseminators of pro-jihadist media material on Twitter.
It was perhaps a sign that Masroor’s tryst with online jihad had entered its last leg.
In October 2014, he was contacted on his elsaltador@gmail.com address with the sender addressing him as “Shami Witness”, despite Masroor deleting all public records that would have connected the email address with his Twitter account. A few days later in November, he got a Facebook friend request which he had created in 2008. He accepted the request assuming it was an acquaintance from college. Behind both of these events was a journalist from Channel 4 News who had somehow found out that Masroor and ShamiWitness were the same individual.
On 11 December, he was outed by Channel 4 and a few hours later he was arrested by the Bangalore police.
But not before the panicked Masroor unsuccessfully tried to convince the channel, which reached out to him through Skype for a response to not release his identity for which he promised he would delete his Twitter account. During the conversation, he told the journalist that he was scared, and that he ran the account mainly to share information about ISIS, that he did not support the beheading of innocent people, but the religious books do prescribe beheadings.
POLICE INVESTIGATIONS AND TRIAL
But was he just a disseminator of information as he had told Channel 4, an argument that was also taken up by him during his trial?
Court documents accessed by The Sunday Guardian that show the pain-staking police investigation led by M.K. Thammaiah, who was the Assistant Commissioner of Police and is now posted as Additional Superintendent of Police, Hasan, and the findings of the court show that Masoor was not just a “post-office” of ISIS, but encouraged people to join ISIS, suggested ways on how they could reach Raqqa and Mosul and how Kashmir should be the next converging point for jihad, indicating he had assumed the role of a propagator of violent fundamentalism.
The police presented 15,540 pages of tweets to show the difference between Masroor the real person and ShamiWitness, his online persona.
The first hearing in the case was held on 29 June 2015 and the final order came on 31 January 2024, after a mind boggling 331 hearings in front of the court in which charges were framed, evidence and witnesses were examined and arguments took place. More than 115 people deposed in this case.
Records collected by Thammaiah and his teams by reaching out through sustained efforts to Twitter, Google, Facebook, multiple telecom operators, show that Masoor would support of the claim of cession of Jammu & Kashmir from Union of India, tweeted/re-tweeted in support of terrorists who were attacking the civilians and the Indian forces, referring to Kashmir as “Occupied Kashmir”, the Indian forces as “Occupation Forces” while encouraging Muslims in India to believe that the Muslims are being attacked relentlessly by the Indian government and there is no justice for Muslims in India. He regularly called upon Muslims to support the Caliphate in Jammu & Kashmir, tweeted and re-tweeted with updates with an intention to support the terrorist acts in Jammu & Kashmir.
Apart from Kashmir, Masroor not just acted as the transmitter of news, but with an intention to terrorize them, tweeted thousands of pictures of graphic scenes of beheading of minorities and followers of other sects other than Sunni.
The accused with a wilful intention to strike fear in the hearts and minds of the Shia minorities living in the areas occupied by ISIS, encouraged the brutal beheadings and executions and torture of the minorities by the followers of ISIS and its supporters, He justified such violence by quoting the various texts of radical Islamic preachers that beheading, killing of opponents is permitted in Islam and that such acts were permitted against “non-believers”.
He posted several tweets pushing youths to join ISIS for commission of a terrorist act by suggesting to them that it was the obligation of a Muslim to join ISIS, it was obligatory to give bayah (pledge) to a Khalifah and there was no life without jihad. He also told the Muslim youth not to tell their family until they had joined ISIS.
The police combed through 130,000 tweets, list of all 18,000 followers, Facebook messenger contents, chat history, complete data backup. Details sought from Google, however, were not shared by the company.
The chargesheet in the case exceeded more than 36,000 pages.
In the court, the judge had to decide on 11 points, out of which nine were proved, while two remained unproven.
THAMMAIAH SPEAKS
Speaking to The Sunday Guardian, M.K. Thammaiah, said that after he was arrested, Masroor was mostly cooperative because the police had already collected so much technical evidence that he could not deny that he was ShamiWitness and that he was propagating violent jihadi ideology and calling for cessation of Kashmir from India.
“He is not a ‘misguided’ youth, he is highly radical and even when he was in prison, he would propagate this ideology and started interacting with other radicalized elements after which we had to put him in solitary confinement, which was also brought to the attention of the honourable court that also warned him from doing such activities. He was cooperative with us because we had caught him red handed and collected the relevant evidence that linked him to ShamiWitness. It was a very difficult job, as companies like Twitter did not extend the cooperation as much as they should have,” he told The Sunday Guardian.
According to Thammaiah, it would be incorrect to just call him a mere messenger of ISIS, as many pro-ISIS and other individuals had termed him when he was arrested in 2014. “He was not just a messenger. He put out original tweets supporting, encouraging the kind of activities ISIS was doing. His content on Kashmir was also highly radicalized, he would present terrorists killed in Kashmir as martyrs and ask ISIS fighters to go to Kashmir. He would justify beheadings while quoting religious books which made him so popular on Twitter,” he said.
Thammaiah said that Masroor told the investigators about how from 2009 he became an active participant and member of Ansar al-Mujahideen English website, one of the most prolific jihadist discussion forums that began in 2008 and within months’ time, blossomed into a prolific, multi-language enterprise with an enviable following of skilled and highly-motivated English-speaking members, including members of Al-Qaeda. Many of the members there, would just translate and redistribute jihadist propaganda and instructional materials from Arabic to English, promoting the mission of Al Qaeda, and establishing new online sanctuaries for jihadist activists.
This reporter was also a member of this forum till 2015 when it was shut down.
On the last day of the hearing, Thammaiah and the special public prosecutor, Shankar T. Bikkannavar were praised by the Special NIA court for their impeccable work in the case. “The IO Thammaiah M.K. has taken a lot of pain to collect the evidence against the accused to bring him to the law book and he was also very punctual in attending the court. The efforts made by Thammaiah and his punctuality require appreciation. It is also required to appreciate the valuable assistance extended by the SPP Shankar T. Bikkannavar,” Judge C.M. Gangadhar said.
What will Masroor do after coming out of prison? At least the security officials don’t know. Given his “illustrious” past, he would remain on the radar of the security agencies for long after he left Bangalore Central Jail.
The shadow that the 34-year-old “witness” to ISIS cruelties carries with himself is dark and long. Whether he will go back to his native place in Biman Nagar, Kaikhali, Kolkata is something that only time will tell. The path to redemption, for Masoor if he chooses to stay on that is not an easy one.