Zubair’s case is not politically motivated: Delhi Police

New Delhi: The Delhi Police on Tuesday outrightly denounced claims that termed the arrest of Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of fact-checking portal Alt News, as politically motivated.
“It is not right to call this case politically motivated. He had been evasive during the questioning, which basically formed the ground of his arrest,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (IFSO, Special Cell), K.P.S. Malhotra, told IANS.
Zubair, 33, was arrested by the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of Delhi Police’s Special Cell for allegedly posting a controversial tweet that hurt sentiments of a particular religious community.
The IFSO functions under the Special Cell and is a specialised unit that handles all complex and sensitive cases of cyber crime, including those in which victims are women and children.
The unit is equipped with a state-of-the-art cyber lab having cyber forensic capabilities such as extraction of deleted data from hard disks and mobile phones, imaging and hash value calculation, forensic servers, portable forensic tools for on-site examination, facility to extract data from latest Android and iOS phones as well as Chinese phones.
The tweet for which Zubair was being questioned is four years old. In the said tweet, Zubair had used a screengrab of an old Hindi movie which showed an image of a hotel, with its board reading Hanuman hotel’ instead of Honeymoon hotel’.