Mohammed Zubair

Some Lesser Known Facts About Mohammed Zubair

• Mohammed Zubair is an Indian software engineer and journalist who co-founded the Indian non-profit fact-checking website Alt News in 2017 along with Pratik Sinha. On 27 June 2022, Zubair was arrested by the Delhi Police for allegedly hurting religious sentiments through one of his tweets posted in 2018.

• In February 2017, Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair launched the Alt News website in Ahmedabad to combat the phenomenon of fake news. Initially, Zubair only aided Sinha in running the site and continued his job at Nokia. In September 2018, Zubair finally quit his job at Nokia and became a full-time employee of Alt News.

• Previously, Zubair worked as a software engineer at Nokia for more than 10 years.

• In December 2019, Zubair became a director of the Pravda Media Foundation, the parent company of Alt News.

• Zubair’s arrest on 27 June 2022 raised concerns all over the world about the sharp decline in Press freedom in India. Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for UN chief Antonio Guterres, talked about Zubair’s arrest at the daily news briefing in the United States and said,
  

  In any place around the world, it is very important that people be allowed to express themselves freely, journalists be allowed to express themselves freely and without the threat of any harassment…Journalists should not be jailed for what they write, what they tweet and what they say. And that goes for anywhere in the world, including in this room.”

• Following Zubair’s arrest in June 2022, various media houses falsely reported that his bank account had transactions over Rs 50 lakh in the previous days. To put an end to the false allegations, Pratik Sinha, via a tweet, revealed that the police were linking donations received by Alt News to Zubair.