IT firm will dissect ISIS Twitter handler Mehdi Biswas’s 1.29 lakh tweets as cops can’t

BENGALURU: A company from India's Silicon Valley will have a new account in its hand, thanks to Bengaluru police. The cops are outsourcing the task of analyzing 1.29 lakh tweets on @ShamiWitness, Mehdi Masroor Biswas' pro-ISIS Twitter handle, because they lack the expertise to do the job. The investigation, senior officers indicate, cannot progress without these tweets being deciphered.

"We are outsourcing the data analysis work to an agency. The job will take some more time given that there are more than a lakh tweets and 1,700 handles that had followed @ShamiWitness," police commissioner M N Reddi told reporters on Saturday. The work requires technical expertise, which the police department lacks, he admitted.

Refusing to name the companies being spoken to, Reddi said: "We are seeking outside help as this isn't a normal criminal case but requires much more specialization. We are in discussion with third parties for the job, which will commence soon."

The selected company will try to track the origin of the handles to which Mehdi tweeted, and those he received tweets from. A senior officer told STOI: "This will provide crucial evidence on the kind of people he was communicating with."

Another senior officer said the department has data from the hard drive of Mehdi's laptop, from where he accessed his Twitter handle since 2009. "But the investigation cannot progress until this is deciphered."

"Once we identify each of his contacts we'll know who he was regularly in touch with, where they hailed from, whether they had any direct contact with the ISIS and Mehdi," the officer said.

"As far as we know, Mehdi was an activist, and there were no funds coming in for him or for his propaganda machinery from the ISIS. We are sure he was good in Arabic and able to translate day-to-day developments concerning the terror group sitting here."