KARACHI – After taking the Islamic State (ISIS) social media manager into custody, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Thursday confirmed that the suspected had been arrested for ‘unethical, misleading, click baiting’.
Imran alias Saiful Islam, who was arrested during a raid in which ISIS ‘s flag, laptop, internet devices and mobile phones were also seized from Karachi, managed the Pakistan pages for the Middle East terrorist group, whose Khorasan faction encompasses the Af-Pak region.
FIA officials confirm that Imran was seen making misleading banners on ISIS’ official page.
“After going through the data that we’ve collected from his laptop, and going through his Facebook posts as an Admin of the ISIS page, we can safely say that Imran alias Saiful Islam is guilty of the heinous crime of unethical click baiting,” an official told The Dependent.
According to officials, the suspect was also involved in the brainwashing of budding social media professionals, encouraging them to sensationalise headlines, and choose misleading images, to generate traffic to the ISIS website.
“The FIA will no longer tolerate the ‘bara ailaan’, ‘ahem khabar’, ‘maroof adaakara’, ‘bari wicket gir gayi’, ‘aap hairaan reh jaeinge’ that end up completely differently when the link is clicked,” a senior FIA official told The Dependent.
Following the arrest, counter-terrorism efforts have been upped to identify and take down other social media executives guilty of the same crime as Imran, sources told The Dependent.
