The Mumbai Police's Cyber Cell on Wednesday detained a 23-year-old man from Hyderabad for giving a rape threat on Twitter to Indian men's cricket team captain Virat Kohli's daughter.
The accused, identified as Ramnagesh Srinivas Akubathini, was detained in Hyderabad and is being taken to Mumbai.
An investigation by BOOM revealed that the now-deleted Twitter account which gave the rape threat belonged to Telugu-speaking Indian right-wing user.
Read the investigation here.
Following India's loss to Pakistan at the 2021 ICC T20 World Cup, India fast bowler Mohammed Shami was subjected to Islamophobic comments. The 31-year-old was blamed for the Indian men's team's first loss to Pakistan at an ICC World Cup.
Kohli defended Shami calling those who trolled Shami "spineless". "To me, attacking someone over their religion is the most pathetic thing that a human being can do. Everyone has the right to voice their opinion over what they feel about a certain situation, but I personally have never ever even thought of discriminating (against) anyone over their religion. That's a very sacred and personal thing to every human being," Kohli said.
Kohli's passionate defence of his teammate did not go down well with the Indian right wing with many attacking the Indian captain.
A particularly disturbing tweet by user @criccrazyygirl threatened Kohli and Anushka Sharma's daughter with rape.
Many right wing accounts alleged that the profile was a Pakistani bot account and not an Indian person.
However, an investigation by BOOM found that the user was in fact run by a Telugu-speaking Indian right-wing user, who used to go by the handle @ramanheist.
Judging by the account's tweets, retweets and likes, BOOM managed to narrow down the identity of the user to an individual who spoke Telugu, hailed from Hyderabad and is a right wing supporter based on their history of retweeting posts about BJP, posts by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and a post by Nupur J Sharma, the editor-in-chief of right-wing Indian website OpIndia.
