Representative image

NEW DELHI: Six people from different parts of the city were arrested on Friday for sharing child pornography on social networking sites. They were caught on the basis of an input from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and a US-based agency that has been tracking different social media handles.

The men arrested on Friday have been identified as Sanju Rathod (25), Amit Mandal (24), Narender Kumar (22), Revti Nandan Anand (34), Lok Raj Yajurvedi (61) and Sudama Ram (29). They are accused of downloading and circulating pornographic contents.

During interrogation, they told the cops that they had received the content on WhatsApp groups and uploaded them further. “Lok Raj, who runs a grocery store, had made a fake social media profile of a 19-year-old boy and used that to communicate on various forums. Narender is a third-year student of engineering, while Sanju works as a daily wage labourer at the Azadpur market. Amit works in the housekeeping department of a prominent automobile company in Gurgaon. Sudama works as a cashier in the retail store of a popular fashion designer in South Delhi and Revti Nandan as a tailor,” said a police official.

Recently, a memorandum of understanding was signed between NCRB and National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). As per the agreement, the US-based agency is providing information about sexually offensive content against children which is being shared or uploaded on various social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The social media sites too have started their own monitoring programme to identify the source from which such content is being uploaded or viewed.

“Delhi Police receives technical inputs in the form of cyber tips from big social media and instant messaging platforms. The tips are collated by the NCMEC and shared with police forces as per the digital trail of the sexual offenders,” the official informed.

“We mounted a technical investigation based on the information shared with us by the NCMEC, and arrested the offenders,” said Anyesh Roy, DCP, Cyber Cell.

