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Two-thirds of foreign jihadists on Twitter followed Mehdi

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Operator of ISIS Twitter handle fears for his life

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Twitter's response to Bengaluru man's ISIS handle

This photo which appeared on a jihadist website shows Arib Majeed, the Kalyan youth, who joined ISIS and returned. He is under the custody of NIA now.

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Kalyan youth had told NIA about ISIS Twitter handle

The ISIS, which has renamed itself as simply

Islamic State

, has attracted jihadists from all over the world. The bearded man in above photo is that of a Chechen jihadist, who is seen with other ISIS fighters in Syria.

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Operator of ISIS Twitter handle may have fled Bengaluru

This photo shows Yazidi refugees in a camp near Mosul in Iraq's Kurdistan. The ISIS has reportedly killed thousands of Yazidi men, who are an ethnic minority in Iraq, and taken thousands of Yazidi women and girls as slaves.

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Terrorists testing waters ahead of Obama visit?

Read this story in Hindi:

बेंगलुरु से ISIS का ट्विटर चलाने वाला मेहदी कौन?

DELHI/BENGALURU: Intelligence agencies are scanning the employee records of a leading Indian software company headquartered in Bengaluru, to identify the man behind @ShamiWitness , an ISIS propaganda Twitter account.This follows a Channel 4 report that claimed that one "Mehdi" was running what was “perhaps ISIS’s most influential Twitter account, which was seen two million times each month and was followed by two-thirds of all foreign fighters” on the microblogging site. Intelligence sources identified him as Mehdi Masroor Biswas from Bengal.Soon after the British broadcaster’s report surfaced, Indian intelligence agencies contacted Twitter for details of the account, but there was no response till late evening.The National Intelligence Agency was already on the trail after Arib Majeed, an ISIS recruit from Kalyan (Mumbai) it arrested in November, said during interrogation that he was following an ISIS Twitter account which he had heard was being run by a man from Bengaluru.An investigation was launched by NIA and IB after it was revealed that a journalist had found a link between the Twitter account and a Facebook account run by an employee of an Indian IT giant.This led agencies to scan employee rolls of the company for persons who fit the profile mentioned in the FB account. Based on this, they have drawn up a list of suspects. One person who carries some resemblance to the wanted suspect is at present in Delhi to attend a wedding. However, there remains some doubt as the man does not exactly resemble the photo on the suspect’s FB profile.Another suspect has been traced to the Mysuru branch of the company. An NIA team which went to his residence recently found that he had moved out four days ago. It also gathered that the man had joined the software company’s headquarters in Bengaluru four years ago before being transferred to Mysuru on request.The agencies told TOI this was an elimination exercise and the suspect had not been identified yet. They believe concrete information will come only after Twitter gets back to them. “Otherwise, this search may not lead anywhere,” said an intelligence official.The channel claimed that in an interview to the channel, Mehdi said, “If I had a chance, I would’ve left everything and joined them. But my family needs me here. My parents are dependent on me.”The account is no longer operational. It provided graphic accounts of the ISIS war, based on information provided to him by his online followers.The account operator is reported to have claimed that he was in regular contact with British jihadis before they left to join the ISIS and after they arrived.He had been encouraging ISIS fighters through his tweets, and had posted the video of US aid worker Peter Kassig's beheading five times, Channel 4 said, adding he had tweeted them “within minutes of it being uploaded to the internet”.The report said the man behind @ShamiWitness posted thousands of updates to his Twitter account every month, usually from his mobile phone. He also reportedly tweeted in November that “May Allah guide, protect, strengthen and expand the Islamic State. Islamic State brought peace, autonomy, zero corruption, low crime rate.”The channel reported how the Twitter account would express happiness at the “deaths and rapes of Kurdish fighters”, but later said these were “taken out of context”.Channel 4 also reported that his FB account was markedly different and had routine updates about dinners and work parties. Mehdi, the channel reported, regularly shared “jokes, funny images, talks about super hero movies, posting pictures of pizza dinners with friends and Hawaiian parties at work”. There were also indications of his “Islamist ideology” in conversations about “Libyan and Egyptian uprisings”.