The Goa Police Crime Branch on Wednesday arrested a 35-year-old man of South Goa's Vasco port town for posting a fake news in Facebook on Tuesday, which claimed that Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, who is currently being treated for advanced pancreatic cancer in the United States, is no more.
The Crime Branch sleuths arrested Kenneth Silveira after interrogating him for several hours on Wednesday, 18 April.
"He has been arrested under Section 505 of the Indian Penal Code and will be produced before a magistrate on Thursday," Superintendent of Police (Crime Branch) Karthik Kashyap told reporters.
Section 505 of the IPC deals with circulation of fake messages to cause public alarm.
Silveira’s post, which was uploaded in Facebook on Tuesday, read: “Just got news that Parrikar is no more”.
In subsequent messages on his Facebook wall, Silveira accepted that his message was incorrect after other commentators on his wall informed him of the folly, but he did not delete the fake message from his wall.
Incidentally, one of the messages on Silveira's Facebook wall is from the Officer on Special Duty to Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, Rupesh Kamat, who in a cryptic text earlier in the day said: "Time to go in."
The police claimed that the arrest was necessary as Silveira, who is in the hospitality industry, was not co-operating with their probe.
Parrikar was moved to a medical facility in New York last month, a few weeks after he was first hospitalised on 15 February after experiencing stomach pain. Having been hospitalised in Goa and Mumbai, he has been unable to attend the office for nearly two months now.
The chief minister's office has maintained that Parrikar suffers from "mild pancreatitis", but refused to issue a regular medical bulletin, despite demands from the Opposition.
In February, a journalist running a digital messaging service was barred from entering the precincts of Goa Legislative Assembly soon after he disclosed the severity of Parrikar's ailment.
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