Thane woman arrested for abusing Devendra Fadnavis’ wife on Facebook
The woman, Smruti Panchal, had been posting objectionable content on Amruta Fadnavis’ Facebook page for two years, the police said.
The Maharashtra Police on Tuesday arrested a 50-year-old woman for allegedly posting abusive comments on the Facebook page of Amruta Fadnavis, the wife of Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, PTI reported.
The police alleged that the arrested woman, a Thane resident named Smruti Panchal, had been posting objectionable content on Amruta Fadnavis’ official Facebook page for the past two years. She used several fake accounts for this purpose, according to the police.
A complaint about the abusive messages was filed by Bharatiya Janata Party youth wing leader Pallavi Sapre, the Hindustan Times reported. Sapre said that she found a user named Ganesh Kapoor posting objectionable comments on Amruta Fadnavis’ Facebook page.
An official from the cyber cell said that the comments were “highly abusive, vulgar and derogatory in nature”. The police tracked the IP address of the device from which the comments were posted. It reportedly led them to Panchal.
The woman has been booked under the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act, 2000. The police seized two handsets from her.
“Panchal had similarly abused people using her original Facebook account, following which in November 2021 the authorities wrote to Facebook to ‘take down’ her account as it was abusive,” an unidentified police official told the Hindustan Times. “The account was taken down by Facebook. She then created another Facebook account in the name of Ganesh Kapoor. For this, she has also created a similar sounding fake email account.”
A court in Mumbai has remanded Panchal to police custody till Thursday, an unidentified police official told PTI.