Mangaluru, Aug 19: Melwyn, a resident of Ullal near here who was one among the several Indians stranded in Afghanistan after the Taliban took control, seems relieved after he returned to his hometown on Thursday.

Melwyn, who was working at the electrical maintenance department of the military base camp hospital of NATO in Kabul, safely returned to India in the Indian Air Force (IAF) plane from Kabul on Wednesday. His brother is still stuck in Afghanistan and is expected to return to India soon.

Talking to reporters, Melwyn said 160 people including seven employees of his company, along with personnel and security of the Indian embassy in Kabul, were airlifted from Kabul at 5 am on Wednesday and brought to the IAF base at Jamnagar and to Delhi. He came to Bengaluru on Wednesday and reached Ullal on Thursday.

"Our organisation has shifted other people of Indian origin working in our company to various places including Norway, London and Qatar. They will be kept in quarantine there and will return to India after completing the isolation period," he said.

Melwyn's brother Demy is working as an air-conditioning mechanic at the Kabul military base camp. He is waiting for a flight at Kabul airport to get back to India. Melwyn said his brother is safe at the airport.

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New Delhi: Gurugram Police have arrested BJP Yuva Morcha member Hariom Mishra, for allegedly spreading a fabricated and communally sensitive story on social media about the murder of a college student in Gurugram.

Mishra who is also known as Shaurya Mishra had shared a collage of four photographs on his X handle earlier this month. He claimed that a 24-year-old college student, identified as Nikita Agarwal, had been murdered by her classmate Arif Khan in Gurugram. In the post, he alleged that the woman was blackmailed, forced into prostitution, gangraped, and eventually killed. He also claimed that Arif dumped her body in a forest. The claims were presented as being based on police sources.

The post went viral and garnering over 1.5 lakh views, and was amplified by several right-wing social media handles across X, Facebook and Instagram. A verification of the claims revealed that no such incident had taken place in Gurugram. A search of credible news reports showed no record of any such murder. The police said this news would have inevitably attracted media attention if it were true.

On December 11, Gurugram Police publicly refuted the claims through their official X handle. They stated that the information which was being circulated was completely false. The police warned that legal action would be taken against those spreading misinformation. Despite the warning, Mishra neither deleted the post nor issued any clarification.

Police in Gurugram confirmed Mishra's arrest on December 16. The police said a FIR was filed after he continued to spread false information about the alleged murder of a Hindu woman by Muslim man. Police said Mishra, a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Kaushambi district, is now being investigated.

Gurugram Police spokesperson Sandeep Singh told The Print that the accused had deliberately misrepresented facts and used objectionable content to spread hatred along religious lines. “Such posts can create serious disturbances in society, and the police take these matters very seriously,” he said.

A reverse image search conducted by fact-checkers at Alt News, revealed that the photographs used in the viral post were unrelated to the claims, while two of the images were traced to a Pinterest account belonging to influencer Maulik Chopra and another image was sourced from an Instagram post by influencer Shivam Thakur featuring a woman named Deepanshi Rawat. The fourth image was found on an unrelated Instagram page. The images depicted different individuals and had no connection to any crime.
Police said they are also investigating Mishra’s motive behind sharing the false and provocative content.