Google techie lynched on child-kidnap suspicion

A long drive on his weekly day off along with a relative and friends proved to be deadly for Mohammad Azam, a software engineer working with Google, who was beaten to death by a mob in Karnataka's Bidar district on Friday on suspicion of being a child lifter.

It was a pleasure trip for the friends, who were enjoying the outing in the countryside. Relatives of Azam say they stopped at a hamlet and were taking pictures. One of them, Salham Eid Al Kubasi, a Qatari national and a friend of Azam who was on a vacation to India, saw a group of children returning from a school. As he was carrying chocolates brought from Qatar, he offered them to a few children out of affection.

When some people saw strangers, including a foreigner, offering chocolates to children, they mistook them to be child lifters. They started questioning them. Sensing trouble, the group decided to flee the place in their car which was, incidentally, without a number plate, fuelling suspicion.

To aggravate matters, few residents of the hamlet alerted people of nearby village Murki on their mobile phones.

At Murki, a mob chased the car and forced it to stop. The mob dragged out the occupants and started beating them with sticks and stones. After some time, police rushed to the spot and dispersed the mob. While Azam died on the spot, others

sustained critical injuries. Two of them are battling for life at a hospital in Hyderabad.

The family of Azam, a father of a two-year-old child, is seeking justice. "We are software engineers. Do we look like child lifters," asked Mohammad Akram’s brother, also a techie, who fails to understand why the mob did not believe their clarifications. More than 20 people have been killed across India over rumours in the last few months.

According to officials, about 30 persons have been arrested in this connection, including an administrator (admin) of a WhatsApp group that spread rumours about child-lifting gangs and galvanised the mob, besides the person who shot the pictures of the attack and circulated it.

Five people were recently killed in north Maharashtra's Dhule district over child-lifting rumours on social media.