Hyderabad, April 12: The Hyderabad police are gunning for Google after it took them weeks to get the company to block an incendiary video posted on YouTube.
The police on Monday arrested four persons, two of them students, for posting the content, but the brain behind it has fled to Saudi Arabia.
Sources in the investigation say Google is likely to be named as one of the accused in the case.
The six-minute video, based on an Indian epic and having controversial content, was posted on YouTube, a Google subsidiary, about three months ago.
“It is based on a famous mythological serial but the background was altered to include some objectionable content,’’ said an investigator.
The video received lakhs of hits across the globe before it came to the notice of the Hyderabad police.
Since then, several notices were sent to the legal head of Google here, asking the company to block the content immediately. But sources said the company took no action.
Finally, on Saturday, a whole battery of policemen landed at the Google office and buttonholed Chakrapani Reddy, the legal head of the company.
They threatened severe action if the content was not blocked forthwith. The company complied within two hours thereafter. The link to the post now leads to the message “this video is not available in your country.’’
After getting the video blocked, the police have got down to investigating the people behind it.
Initially, they suspected the hand of known fundamentalists in the city, but inputs indicated otherwise.
Now, police are set to make Google an accused for allowing the posting in the first place. One of the four young men arrested for the post, Gubash, who works at a mall at Kachiguda, has allegedly been sending SMSes to his contacts to spread word of the video.
Sleuths got wind of it and kept a watch on him.
He was picked up by the Sultan Bazar police two days ago.
During interrogation, he spilled the beans on his collaborators, Mohsin, Taha and Faisal.
One of them is an engineering student, another a polytechnic and third an auto driver. However, the brain behind the video, Farooq fled to Saudi Arabia.
–Agencies