An Allahabad court on Tuesday issued notices to Google, its Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai and India head Rajan Anandan for supposedly listing Prime Minister Narendra Modi among the top 10 criminals in the world. While hearing a complaint filed by advocate Sushil Kumar Mishra, the court ordered that a criminal complaint case be registered against the global search engine and its top officials. The next hearing is on August 31, reported the Times of India.

Complainant Mishra told the court that while googling "top ten criminals of the world", the search engine shows an image of Modi. According to Times of India, the advocate had initially requested Google to remove it, but got no response. He also claimed to have approached the police. He then filed an application before the chief judicial magistrate, but his plea was dismissed on November 3, 2015, on the grounds that it was a civil case. Mishra then went on to challenge the order and filed a revision application in court.

Modi's image appeared along with those of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, Hafiz Sayeed, and Ayman al-Zawahiri among others. According to Financial Express, Google is already fighting multiple such cases across the world. The matter had sparked a controversy in June last year after which Google issued an apology statement, saying that the image appeared because of a British daily that had an image of Modi and erroneous metadata. According to Dawn, the images appeared with a disclaimer, "These results don’t reflect Google’s opinion or our beliefs; our algorithms automatically matched the query to web pages with these images."