Indian police arrest man suspected of running pro-ISIS Twitter account

A man suspected of running a pro-ISIS Twitter account was arrested Saturday, the police chief for Bangalore said.

Mehdi Masroor Biswas reportedly confessed to operating the ISIS-friendly @ShamiWitness account before it was recently shut down.

The 24-year-old was charged with waging a war or abetting the waging of war against powers friendly to India, police commissioner M.N. Reddi said.

He is also charged under prevention of unlawful activities and anti-cyber-crime laws, Reddi said.

Biswas is expected to appear in court in 24 hours. If convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison, according to the police official.

An electrical engineer by training, Biswas was working as an executive in a food company until this week, Reddi said. He described Biswas as an ISIS "sympathizer."

However, Reddi told CNN that Biswas' efforts on Twitter had been of greater significance outside India than within his native country.

"The effect of what he was doing, the impact of what he was doing was really not about India, nor was he provoking or promoting people within India to align or sympathize with ISIS," he said.

"It was more about how he could manage to anglicize the conversations of ISIS and that led to a huge impact from what I can understand in the European world, particularly in the UK. Therefore the interest was very high in the UK to track and trace him and he incidentally happened to be in Bangalore."

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The exposure this week in UK media of the identity of the man behind the prolific Twitter feed captured headlines worldwide.

The suspect told CNN's UK affiliate ITN that he expected to be arrested even though he believed he had done nothing wrong.

Fearing that the police might kill him during that operation, he also insisted to ITN that he would not resist arrest and was unarmed.

He said he had been overwhelmed by the frenzy of media attention since the identity behind @ShamiWitness was revealed.

"I thought it would die down within the first one or two hours but it's still raging. I can't believe this," he said.

Asked why he thought the persona had provoked such interest, he replied: "I think Shami Witness is the first person who really reached the people who like to wage war with the so-called war on terror."