‘Tea break’ row in lynching case
singrauli (madhya pradesh) — A woman was allegedly lynched by a mob near here in Madhya Pradesh on suspicion that she was a childlifter, police said on Monday.
The woman, who appeared to be “mentally unstable”, was killed by the mob in Bhosh village under the Morwa police station on July 19, Morwa sub-divisional officer of police (SDOP) K S Dwivedi told PTI over the phone.
Believed to be aged between 25 to 30 years, the woman is yet to be unidentified, he said. The lynching took place amid rumours on WhatsApp that child-lifters were on the prowl in rural areas of the district, the officer said.
The rumours were circulating for the last one month, Dwivedi said.
Twelve people were arrested on Sunday in connection with the lynching incident and produced on Monday in a local court, which sent them to jail, Dwivedi said.
The SDOP said some people spotted
the woman roaming in the village at around 9.30pm on July 19. They stopped her, suspecting her to be a child-lifter and hit her with sticks and axes, Dwivedi said.
After killing the woman, the mob dumped her body in a drain in a forested area of Bhosh, some 90km from the district headquarters, he said. Some villagers spotted the
body on July 20 and informed the police, he added.
The police arrested 12 people and booked them for rioting and murder, among other charges under the IPC, the SDOP said.
He said efforts are on to identify the deceased.
The accused men told police they caught hold of the woman late
on Saturday after finding her moving suspiciously and seeing a flurry of WhatsApp messages about gangs of child kidnappers in the area, Singrauli police chief Riyaz Iqbal told AFP.
“We are trying to identify the victim and have circulated her picture to all the police stations,” Iqbal added. —