Following a protest call by former JNU Students’ Union vice president Shehla Rashid at the CBI headquarters in New Delhi on Monday, 26 February, to highlight the police inaction in the Najeeb Ahmed case, a discredited news story from 2017 linking Najeeb to ISIS is going viral, again.
First year JNU student Najeeb Ahmed went missing on 15 October 2016 from the college hostel after an alleged altercation with ABVP members.
In an attempt to mar the protests, some people are sharing a discredited 2017 report of The Times of India which said Najeeb could be an ISIS sympathiser.
The story, published on TOI’s front page on 21 March 2017, claimed that Najeeb’s internet browsing history allegedly showed that he searched for ISIS’ “ideology, execution and network” and also for “ways to join ISIS” and similar queries.
After a few journalists tried to verify the information, the Delhi Police denied the allegations, and a petition demanding an unconditional apology from the national daily had been brought up. The article was not retracted and has now resurfaced again.
Amid uproar, The Times of India was compelled to publish a 75-word comment from the Delhi Police, denying access to information on Najeeb’s search history.
Senior BJP leader Ram Madhav retweeted Jaswant Singh, a BJP member, who shared the link to the fake news report. He later deleted the tweet and apologised for sharing the same.
Senior journalist Swapan Dasguptaa too retweeted Jaswant Singh’s tweet, but has now removed the post.
Amid other people sharing the discredited news report again, Twitter influencer Shefali Vaidya, who shared the article, was corrected by ABVP leader Gaurav Jha.
Several others, knowingly or unknowingly, have been sharing the report. Some media organisations also fell prey to the fake news.
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