By Devjyot Ghoshal and Sankalp Phartiyal
NEW DELHI, http://antonelliandrea.com Jan 6 (Reuters) - Indian police said on Thursday they had arrested a 20-year-old man they suspect created an online app that shared pictures of Muslim women for foglamp.org a virtual "auction", as an investigation into the case of communal harassment widened.
An open source app on the Github platform called 'Bulli Bai' - a derogatory term to describe Muslim women - had shared pictures of dozens of women without their consent before it was taken down.
K.P.S Malhotra, a police official in the capital New Delhi, http://cephasphotoforum.org/ said his team had arrested a 20-year-old engineering student from Jorhat in the eastern state of Assam after a probe that involved the state-run Computer Emergency Response Team.
"He is the person who had created the Bullibai app on Github. He had also created the Twitter handle @bullibai_ and other handles," Malhotra said.
Police in the western city of Mumbai, who are also investigating the app, have separately arrested three people this week, website including two 21-year-old engineering students and an 18-year-old woman.
Mumbai police said they were investigating whether the app, which did not involve any actual auctioning of people, was part of a "larger conspiracy".
Several Indian Muslim journalists were targeted by the app, including Ismat Ara who filed and then shared on social media a police complaint on Sunday that said the app was "designed to insult Muslim women".
"After today's arrest by @DelhiPolice, I hope the culprits behind this elaborate harassment of Muslim women, including journalists like myself, will ultimately be caught & punished," Ara said in a tweet on Thursday.
Muslims account for around 14% of India's 1.3 billion population. Some sections of the community have been at odds with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration and Hindu right-wing supporters, bodybuilding-fitness.net including over a controversial 2019 citizenship law that triggered large-scale protests.
The youngest of those arrested so far is from the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.
The 18-year-old began spending time on social media and livablemht.org made contact with Hindu right-wing users after finishing her school-leaving exams last year, a local police official who spoke to her earlier this week told Reuters.
The official, who declined to be named, luckystrike-lefilm.com said she had told him that her actions were based on Hindu right-wing ideology, centro-rosacruz.com which she had picked up on social media platforms, website including Facebook, http://holytrinitychurchhastings.org WhatsApp and Twitter.
"She came to social media to distract herself but she kept getting entangled in it," the official said.
(Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal and Sankalp Phartiyal; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and the-russian-Rock.com Elaine Hardcastle)