Over 80,000 fake social media accounts were created on the day of Sushant’s death (June 14th) to discredit Mumbai police and Maharashtra govt probe.
Mumbai Police’s cyber unit has also discovered that the posts were made from different countries like Italy, Japan, Poland, Slovenia, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Romania and France.
As per a Hindustan Times article, a senior IPS officer stated, “We identified the posts in foreign languages because of the hashtags used like #justiceforsushant #sushantsinghrajput and #SSR. We’re in the process of verifying more accounts.”
“The campaign was run against Mumbai police just to demoralise us at a time when 84 policemen had died due to the pandemic and over 6,000 men were infected with the virus. This was a motivated campaign with vested interest just to malign the image of Mumbai police and derail our line of investigation. Multiple fake accounts on social media were created to target Mumbai police with abusive tones. Our cyber cell is conducting a thorough investigation into this matter and all those found violating the law will be prosecuted under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act,” said Param Bir Singh, Mumbai police commissioner.
Param Bir Singh also reacted to the AIIMS report saying, “We had investigated this case very professionally. The CBI had created a panel of AIIMS doctors who have justified our investigation and the findings of Cooper hospital and forensic laboratory. Except for a few people, nobody else was aware of our investigation still many have criticized the investigation.”
An FIR has also been lodged against social media users for trolling the commissioner on different platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram under 67 IT act.
“Several social media account holders are trolling the Mumbai Police commissioner on different platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and are using abusive language against him and the force. Hence an FIR has been registered against those account holders under 67 IT act. Most of these accounts are fake and we will be taking action against all those fake account holders. Then another FIR has been registered against the culprit who used a morphed image of the official Twitter account of Mumbai Police commissioner recently. We have started the probe in both the matters,” said DCP Rashmi Karandikar.