New Delhi: Fatima Nafees, mother of Najeeb Ahmed – a Jawaharlal Nehru University student who has been missing since October 2016 – has filed a defamation case against certain media houses for portraying her son to be an “ISIS sympathiser”.In her lawsuit filed in the Delhi high court against Times of India, Times Now, Dilli Aajtak as well as reporters of the India Today group, Ahmed’s mother has sought damages worth Rs 2.2 crore and immediate retraction of all articles, according to a LiveLaw report.She said that even though she had earlier sent a legal notice to Dilli Aajtak, she did not get any response.In her suit filed through the Human Rights Law Network, Nafees has claimed that a Times of India report from March 2017 quoted police sources saying her son Ahmed was looking for information about the terrorist organisation a day before his disappearance on October 14, 2016.Ahmed had reportedly gone missing following an alleged assault on him by the ABVP, a student group affiliated to the RSS.The Wire had earlier reported on the Times of India article in question, which was carried on the front page of the daily on March 21, 2017. In the story, journalist Raj Shekhar Jha, on the basis of conversations with anonymous “highly placed sources” claimed, Ahmed’s internet browsing history apparently showed that he was looking for information on ISIS’s “ideology, execution and network,” and that his searches included “ways to join ISIS” and similar such queries.Nafees stated in her lawsuit that the reporter failed to verify the information he claimed to have received from sources, considering it to be unnecessary.The article, for which the daily drew considerable criticism from civil society and students alike, had further claimed that the conclusions were drawn from a report on Ahmed’s browsing history, which was accessed by the Delhi police.Soon after the TOI story was published, many television channels picked up the news – including Times Now, which according to the lawsuit ran tickers titled “Najeeb searched for information on ISIS” – without confirming the charges with the Delhi police, whose officials had subsequently denied having accessed any such report on Ahmed’s browsing history.As per the LiveLaw report, Nafees stated that despite officials saying that their investigation did not suggest links between Ahmed and the ISIS, media houses failed to retract their stories.Times of India, on its part, had published a short comment from the Delhi police on March 22 in which officials had denied having accessed any such information on Ahmed.
