It had seemed a regular Monday evening for Kalim Ahmed, 22, a writer at Alt News, when he reached home after shutting his office in Kolkata on June 27. But then a message from the factchecking platform’s director Nirjhari Sinha popped on his screen, informing him of the arrest of Alt News cofounder and managing editor Mohammed Zubair.
The journalist was called for questioning in a 2020 case in which he has protection from arrest from the Delhi high court, only to be held for allegedly hurting religious sentiments and promoting enmity through a four-year-old tweet, which an anonymous Twitter user who has since vanished from the social media platform apparently found offensive. The Delhi police later added charges of criminal conspiracy, disappearance of evidence and violation of foreign funding rules to the case, and Zubair, who already had five FIRs against him, is now in 14-day judicial custody.
