Twitter headquarters
Twitter headquartersReuters

A man suspected of running an influential Twitter account promoting the Islamic State (ISIS) has been arrested in southern India, the BBC reported on Saturday.

The man, a 24-year-old working in Bangalore, was named as Mehdi Masroor Biswas.

The arrest comes after the British Channel 4 News said it had identified the man running the account.

The @ShamiWitness account, which has since closed, provided news on ISIS and celebrated its rise in Syria and Iraq.

Police said Biswas was arrested for cyber-terrorism offences and crimes against the state, but they do not believe he has actual links to ISIS.

An engineer by training, Biswas went online late at night to "ferociously tweet" information about ISIS, police said.

With nearly 18,000 followers, @ShamiWitness was one of the main sources of information about the group in English, noted the BBC.

ISIS has used social media to recruit foreign fighters and to disseminate videos of their fighters beheading Western journalists and aid workers.

While the group uses Twitter regularly, a Jerusalem-based cell of ISIS at one point threatened to kill Twitter employees and target its offices if the social media site does not stop closing down ISIS accounts.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in October that he and his staff have received death threats from ISIS.

Costolo noted that ISIS operates outside of the speech that’s protected by Twitter’s terms of use. When the company is alerted, he claimed, it shuts those accounts down “effortlessly.”

The Channel 4 News report said he told followers that he would have joined ISIS himself if his family did not depend on him.

"If I had a chance to leave everything and join them I might have... my family needs me here," he said.