Man in Belapur circulates child porn on Facebook, arrested

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The Navi Mumbai police recently booked a Belapur resident for allegedly circulating child pornography on social media. The absconding accused has been identified as Tarik Anwar. The police acted on a tip off by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), a Mumbai Mirror report read.

This is the second incident where the police were informed by the home ministry, after the ministry received information by the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based NGO.

Anwar has been booked under section 67B (punishment for publishing or transmitting of material depicting children in sexually explicit act, etc, in electronic form) of Information Technology Act. A police officer said the tip off from MHA stated that Anwar had circulated a pornographic video of a minor girl and other obscene videos on Facebook from his profile in May 2019. "We were also provided the accused's Internet Protocol address and his mobile phone number," the police officer was quoted as saying. The police then got in touch with the mobile service provider and obtained information about his residential address.

An offence was registered against Anwar on January 30 and efforts were undertaken to track him down. The report said that last month, UD Tamang alias Jojo, 32, a native of Darjeeling was arrested for a similar offence. The MHA had come across an IP address during social media surveillance and found that the accused uploaded adult content on Facebook.

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