Indian businessman behind pro-Islamic State Twitter account @ShamiWitness

Indian police on Friday said they are looking into reports a Bangalore-based marketing executive is behind a popular pro-Islamic State (IS) group Twitter account.

@ShamiWitness, which had near 18,000 followers and was regularly referenced by international media, has been shut-down after the UK-based Channel 4 News revealed the account holder's identity in an investigation published Thursday evening.

Named only as “Mehdi” the Indian businessman had posted over 130,000 tweets, almost exclusively about the IS group, which has brought large areas of Syria and Iraq under its control in recent months. He regularly expressed support for the group and defended it against criticism in his commentary.

Despite Channel 4 News accusing him of playing a “central role in the IS propaganda war” experts on the militant group have said he was not part of a coordinated strategy and appeared more “a very motivated fan and disseminator” of information.

When asked if he would seek to join the IS group, Mehdi answered that he would but “my family needs me here [in India].”

The head of police in Bangalore said they had not followed the account but were now investigating the matter.

“The city police as well as the internal security division of the Karnataka police are investigating,” MN Reddi told BBC Hindi. 

Mehdi has since spoken again to Channel 4 to express his fear of being killed by police.

“I have a suspicion that the police, when they come to arrest me, they might try to kill me then they would say I tried to attack them,” he said. “I want to state clearly that I won’t resist arrest when the time comes. I don’t have any sort of weapons with me.”

“They are saying in the media there’s an actual manhunt right now. They might take more than 24 hours.”

The marketing executive denied he had broken any laws and defended his actions on Twitter.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. "I haven’t harmed anybody, I haven’t broken any laws of the country [India].”

“I haven’t waged war against anybody. I just said stuff, people followed me, then I followed them back and then we talked. I only knew what the IS fighters or sympathisers said in public tweets.”

Although @ShamiWitness has now been closed a new account, @ShamiWitness_2, has been opened. It is not clear who is operating this account.

Middle East experts said Western intelligence agencies would likely be hurt by @ShamiWitness being shutdown, as it had proved a useful source on IS group movements and developments.

Numerous accounts run by IS supporters and members have been shutdown by Twitter. However, despite having posted footage of beheadings by the group, @ShamiWitness was never closed - a sign, some said, that the account had proved useful to security agencies.

Prominent Arab voices criticised @ShamiWitness, or Mehdi, for having supported the IS group from a safe distance in India, far from the violence taking place in Syria, Iraq and the wider region.

Many Twitter users highlighted the fact Mehdi was neither Shami - Syrian - or a "witness" to the events taking place in the region.

Channel 4 News, in their investigation, reported Mehdi had interacted with British citizens before they left to join IS and later praised their efforts on the battlefield. When one young British man was killed fighting with IS he praised him as having “talked the talk, walked the walk.”

Mehdi denied influencing people to join IS but radicalisation experts said he could have been a source of justification for those seeking to sign up with the group.

“He was justifying and explaining ISIS [another acronym for IS] so that lots of people who were thinking of going to join ISIS could find the arguments and information to justify themselves and legitimise that choice,” Peter Neumann, the director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, told the New York Times.

Mehdi, when asked by Channel 4 if was “an honest Muslim”, said “I try to [be], but I am not sure if I am.”