A mob in Karnataka’s Bidar district killed a man and injured two people on Friday, suspecting them to be child-lifters, The Hindu reported. The alleged incident took place in Aurad taluk’s Murki village.
Mohammed Azam, Talha Ismail and Mohammed Salman – all of whom are from Hyderabad – were travelling along with their friend Mohammed Bashir to his home in Handikera village. When they stopped for a break in Balkut Tanda, Ismail, who had recently returned from Qatar, reportedly offered chocolates to schoolchildren.
The residents reportedly thought that they were child abductors and began assaulting them even though Bashir tried to explain the situation to them.
The four men managed to escape in their car but the residents in the area reportedly called their friends in nearby Murki village and asked them to stop the car. The villagers blocked the road with a tree. The mob then dragged Azam out of the car and hit him with stones and sticks. He died on the spot. Bashir was the only one to escape unhurt.
Soon after, the police arrived at the spot to contain the mob. They rescued the others and admitted them to a hospital in Bidar. They were shifted to Hyderabad on Saturday.
“We know that villagers made the phone calls,” Superintendent of Police D Devaraja told The Hindu. “The role of social media is also being investigated.” The police registered a case against unidentified people but have not arrested anyone yet.
The police across the country have started outreach units to quell fake news since the lynching of two young men from Guwahati in Central Assam’s Karbi Anglong district led to an increase in such incidents. Lynchings have been reported from Maharashtra, Tripura, Assam, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Karnataka. The mobs seem to have been influenced by widely shared WhatsApp videos and messages asking people to beware of child kidnappers. The victims in most cases were people on the margins of society.
Messaging application WhatsApp on Tuesday said it has updated its service to label forwarded messages. The company took action after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology asked it on July 4 to initiate measures to prevent the spread of “explosive messages” and said it would be held accountable and responsible for fake news being spread through its platform.
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