Thrissur: Six persons, including four students of a government polytechnic in Kerala, have been arrested on the charge of defaming Prime Minister Narendra Modi by featuring his photograph in their college magazine under a list of "negative faces" along with Adolf Hitler, George W Bush, Osama bin Laden, and others.
Those arrested last night included lecturer and staff editor Gopi and magazine designer Rajeev.
The college principal M N Krishnan Kutty, who was among the seven persons booked on June 10, was not arrested as he was ill, police said.
All of them were later released on bail, police said.
They were arrested on a complaint by Yuva Morcha State Vice President K K Aneeshkumar.
The police had yesterday raided the polytechnic college at Kuzhoo here and confiscated 392 copies of the magazine, a computer and hard disks of the designers of the magazine.
Meanwhile, five students, closely associated with the printing and publishing of the magazine and all of whom are activists of a student union controlled by a pro-Left campus outfit, have been suspended pending an inquiry, college officials said.
On June 10, they were booked by police and cases registered against them for offences under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), including concealing design to commit offence, wantonly giving provocation, punishment for defamation and printing matter known to be defamatory.
The campus magazine for 2013-14 was released recently and one of its pages titled "negative faces" featured a photograph of Narendra Modi. Others in the list included sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, former LTTE supremo V Prabhakaran, Adolf Hitler, former al-Qaeda chief bin Laden and George W Bush, police said.
