Lucknow: After BJP MLA from Dibai Anita Rajput received an extortion call from Dubai, 11 more BJP MLAs have received similar calls and messages. All the MLAs got WhatsApp messages from +1(903)329-4240 and all of them were asked to pay a sum of '10 lakhs, failing which their family members would be killed.
UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath has directed top police officials to investigate the matter at the earliest and ensure strict punishment for the offenders. The state government has asked a special task force to investigate and crack the case at the earliest. “We have constituted an SIT to probe the matter. The person sending the messages is using proxy servers and we are trying to decipher the IP address. The teams are on the job to track the person,” UP DGP O.P. Singh said.
The 11 BJP MLAs who received the threats, apart from Anita Rajput, include Shashank Trivedi (Sitapur), Lokendra Pratap Singh (Lakhimpur), Veer Vikram Singh (Shahjahanpur), Manvendra Singh (Shahjahanpur) Vinay Dwiwedi (Gonda), Prem Narain Pandey (Gonda), Shyam Bihari Lal (Bareilly), R.K. Sharma (Bilsi), Vinod Katiyar (Bhognipur) and Suresh Srivastava from Lucknow. The 12th MLA to get an extortion threat on Wednesday was Rajnikant Mani Tripathi from Kushinagar. He reported this to the police on Wednesday evening.
Four of the MLAs have registered their complaints in Lucknow, while the others have informed the police.
ADG (law and order) Anand Kumar said: “We are now in touch with Central intelligence agencies on this matter. The messages are being sent through a foreign gateway
and the WhatsApp group of BJP MLAs has obviously been hacked. There appears to be a larger conspiracy behind this.”
A senior police official said that a server in Texas was being used in Bahrain, and the messages and calls were being sent through the Internet.
Interestingly, the sender in all these cases identified himself as Ali Budhesh Bhai, and the language in all the messages was more or less similar. The person appears to be claiming a past link with underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. What is most intriguing is the fact that the sender had used Hindi to send messages and there are no grammatical or spelling mistakes in the language used.
The sender in all cases has asked the legislators to pay a sum of '10 lakhs within three days or else their family members would be eliminated. “This makes us believe that the sender is well versed in Hindi and is trying to create a scare. A Muslim based in Dubai will obviously not be so fluent in writing Hindi”, said a cyber expert.
