Hate app arrests: Shweta Singh was active on social media, used to post extreme content
ACTIVE ON social media, she would at times post extreme contents on her accounts. The posts became more frequent over the past one year until police came knocking on Monday.
Shweta Singh was arrested by Mumbai Police from Udham Singh Nagar in Uttarakhand, where she had been staying to prepare for her college entrance, in connection with the web-based app that targeted Muslim women.
The 19-year-old’s family is originally from Bulandshahr district in Uttar Pradesh. Shweta lost her father, the sole bread-winner for the family, to Covid-19 last year, said Mamta Bohra, City SP, Udham Singh Nagar.
This was the biggest blow to Shweta and her siblings — an elder sister, a younger sister and a younger brother — after losing their mother to cancer in 2011.
For the past few months, the family had been surviving on the Rs 3,000 they got under the Vatsalya Yojana launched for Covid orphans in Uttarakhand and Rs 10,000 from the solar manufacturing unit where their father worked.
Police sources said it was found that Shweta has been active on social media for a long time and would post extreme contents. This intensified after her father’s death. She allegedly used her father’s identity to get a SIM card to operate a Twitter account.
According to preliminary investigation, it was found that she created a fake account on instructions from a social media friend in Nepal. The account was used to allegedly post contents on the app under investigation.
