Cash pours in for man ‘who murdered on social media’

POLICE in India’s western Rajasthan state have frozen the bank account of a Hindu zealot who received public donations of around £3,500 after he was alleged to have murdered a Muslim labourer, burnt his body and posted videos of the incident on social media.

Police officials said Shambhulal Regar received this money from “sympathisers” in an account being operated by Sita Regar, his wife.

Two businessmen were arrested on Wednesday for running the Whatsapp campaign to raise money for Mr Regar, who was arrested on Dec 6, accused of killing Mohammad Afrazul. Police say Mr Regar hacked Mr Afrazul to death a day earlier with an axe and set his body alight, all of which he told his 14-year old nephew to film, before posting it on social media.

‘We will investigate those who deposited money into Regar’s account to see if they had any links to the accused’

In an accompanying video, Mr Regar justified the killing on the grounds that he suspected Mr Afrazul of being in a relationship with a Hindu woman. “This is what will happen to you if you carry out ‘love jihad’,” Mr Regar had declared in the video. Radical Hindu groups have propagated this term, which refers to Muslim men seducing Hindu women in a deliberate campaign to convert them to Islam.

Police sources said Mr Regar’s alleged crime had been “well received” by members of the region’s majority Hindu community, who began depositing small amounts of money into his account to support him.

“We will investigate those who deposited money into Regar’s account to determine if they had any links with the accused,” said Anand Shrivastava, the senior police inspector general.

He said around 300,000 rupees (£3,500) had been deposited into Mr Regar’s account before it was frozen.

Mob violence is increasingly common in India against Muslims for eating beef. Hindu gangs are known to lynch Muslims for consuming or processing beef, or trading in cows, which are sacred to Hindus.

Around 16 per cent of India’s population of 1.25 billion is Muslim and over 80 per cent is Hindu.