Five friends got together to have a drink one evening and — as it commonly happens these days — posted a picture on Facebook that showed them having fun. Only that they had forgotten they were in Bihar, where prohibition is in force. They are now in jail.

All of them were arrested under the stringent Bihar prohibition and excise act for which the State government had recently sought suggestions from common people to make amendments, if required.

According to Nalanda police, a youth, identified as Vicky Arya had on Sunday posted a photograph that showed him and his four friends — all barely 20 years old — drinking. The photograph, which also showed a half-empty liquor bottle, was captioned: “Party all night.” To their misfortune, someone tagged the district police chief, Kumar Ashish, to the photograph.

On Monday morning, when the Nalanda superintendent of police was browsing his Facebook page, he came across the tag and immediately asked his men to ascertain the veracity of the post. “After locating the phone number from the Facebook account, the number was put on surveillance and, later, we arrested Vicky Arya from his house under Laheri police station,” a police official told The Hindu .

“Subsequently we tracked the other four friends from Nalanda and Patna and also found the empty liquor bottle,” said the police official. The five friends were booked under the new Prohibition and Excise Act and sent to jail.

No criminal background

Investigation revealed that Vicky Arya, a student from Biharsharief, district headquarters of Nalanda, had organised the party for his friends on Sunday night. The police said they had no criminal record “but had fallen in bad company.”

After their arrest on Monday, they were produced before a local court which remanded them in judicial custody for two weeks.