23 arrests for Maharashtra lynching; Social media rumours igniting mass hysteria across India
Mumbai, Jul 2 (IBNS) : In all 23 people have been arrested and more are likely to be caught in connection with Sunday's brutal lynching of five men in Maharashtra as the sudden spurt in child-lifting rumours across the country has spawned a dangerous phenomenon.
According to media reports, the lynching of five men in North Maharashtra's Dhule area was the result of rumours of child-kidnapping on WhatsApp, a trend set rolling by some people causing similar tragic incidents in different parts of the country.
According to NDTV, all the accused in the Maharashtra incident are in their twenties and police have identified some more accused in this case.
Seven men from the Gosavi tribe, which goes from door to door to collect food, had arrived from Solapur in a state transport bus and had stopped at the Rainpada village, about 140 km from Dhule town.
They reportedly went to a house to ask for food and one of them tried to speak to a child. This made villagers attending a weekly Sunday market suspected that he was a kidnapper and they attacked him.
Soon a frenzied mob appeared in the scene and they locked the strangers in a room and hit them with bricks and stones till they were dead.
According to reports, two of the men managed to escape.
The men who were killed were reportedly from Solapur district of Maharashtra.
The police say rumours about a gang of child kidnappers active in the area had been circulating on social media and WhatsApp for some days.
NDTV said when the police arrived and gathered the bodies in a car, the crowd demanded that two of the bodies be taken down as they wanted to check that the men were dead. When a policeman refused, he was also attacked.
The same day, a couple was targetted by an angry mob in Malegaon near Nashik after rumours of them being child kidnappers did the rounds. The couple was saved after quick police action.
Similar violence, all ignited by rumours on social media, took place in Assam's Guwahati, where a woman with special needs was tied to a pole and tortured by a village mob. They, too, were suspected her to be kidnappers.
On June 8, two men were beaten to death in Assam's Karbi Anglong. The two-an artiste and a businessman- were there to visit a waterfall.
A mob lynched two persons from Uttar Pradesh, who came to a village in Tripura near the state capital last week. Later, it was learnt that those two were small traders.
The same day, a person hired by the Tripura Government to counter rumours of child-lifting was himself lynched a few days ago.
Two men from Bihar were severely beaten up in Chennai on Saturday night, again over child-lifting rumours.
On June 27 a woman was lynched in Gujarat's Vadaj after a mob labelled her a ‘child-lifter’ and overturned the auto she and two other women were travelling in.
According to reports, while a man with mental problems was beaten up near Waghodia in Vadodara district on Saturday, 14 cases have been recorded earlier in the vicinity of Surat, Rajkot, and Vadodara.
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