Five men were lynched by a mob in India on Sunday, allegedly over rumours about child kidnappers spread through messaging app, WhatsApp.
The victims - members of a nomadic tribe - were passing through a village in the western state of Maharashtra when they were set upon. The police said one of the victims had been accused of talking to a local girl, prompting the villagers to grow suspect of the group and start questioning them.
A police official told the BBC that the villagers began beating the men with bamboo sticks and stones when the locals were not satisfied with the explanation they received.
Two police officers who attempted to restrain the mob were injured in the violence.
12 people were arrested and a curfew was imposed in the area as tensions continued to prevail following the incident.
“The unfortunate incident appears to be a case of false rumours going viral on social media,” Dada Bhuse, the Minister for Rural Development in the Maharashtra state government told the Hindustan Times.
The five men are the latest victims of mob lynchings in India over purported rumours spread through the instant messaging app.
Source: EPA/RITCHIE B. TONGO
According to reports, at least 22 people have been killed in 16 incidents of lynching in the country during the past six weeks.
A 55-year-old woman who was travelling with her son in a car was lynched by a mob in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in May after she gave sweets to some children while her son was enquiring about the route to their destination.
Three different incidents of mob lynchings occurred over two days in the north-eastern state of Tripura on June 28 and 29, and a man was beaten to death in Ahmedabad, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state Gujarat three days earlier.
Irked by a spate of such incidents, the Government of India has warned WhatsApp to check the spread of such “irresponsible and explosive” rumours, saying the circulation of such provocative content on apps like WhatsApp was a matter of “deep concern”.
“Such a platform cannot evade accountability and responsibility especially when good technological inventions are abused by some miscreants who resort to provocative messages which lead to spread of violence,” India’s Minister of Electronics and Information Technology said in a statement.
The incidents of mob violence due to rumours circulating on messaging apps began last year. Since then, several such incidents have occurred in a number of states in India, prompting the police in some parts of the country to start awareness drives against rumour mongering. In Telangana, arrests were made for allegedly circulating false video messages online.
