Child kidnap rumours spark five more mob attacks
AHMEDABAD, India: Indian police urged people yesterday not to believe false rumours spread on WhatsApp after a woman was killed and a dozen hurt in the latest mob attacks to leave authorities looking powerless.
In the worst of the five assaults in the western state of Gujarat on Tuesday, a destitute woman, Shantadevi Nath, and three others were attacked by around 100 people in the main city Ahmedabad.
“Half a dozen people surrounded the women as they were about to board an autorickshaw and started questioning them. Soon the crowd swelled and pulled Shantadevi and her companions out of the rickshaw and started thrashing them,” police official JA Rathwa told AFP.
“People in the crowd rained punches and kicked the four women. Some even hit them with sticks and pulled them by their hair.”
The women were finally rescued by local traffic policemen and taken to hospital but Nath, 45, was declared dead on arrival.
The same viral message which sparked that incident, warning that 300 people had descended on Gujarat looking to abduct and sell children, appears to have triggered four other mob attacks there the same day.
Six people were injured in two separate incidents in Rajkot, 225 kilometres from Ahmedabad, including a family of five visiting to discuss a relative’s marriage prospects.
In two assaults in Surat, 275 kilometres from Ahmedabad, five women were attacked by local villagers while a 45year- old woman was assaulted after locals suspected she had kidnapped her toddler.
“It was a mostly male crowd which took away her daughter as they suspected her to be a kidnapper,” a police officer told journalists.
“Both of them were brought to the police station where it became clear that she was indeed the child’s mother,” the officer added.
Twenty-two people are believed to have perished in the past year, media reports say, because of the same or similar WhatsApp rumours in at least five Indian states.
“Guys please be on high alert,” reads one such message quoted by media.
“Three kids were kidnapped from my friend’s area this morning. There were 10 guys giving biscuits. Parents please be on high alert.”
Another video – actually a Pakistani road safety video – which did the rounds is of a child apparently being snatched by two men on a motorbike.
People have also been beaten to death on suspicion of stealing cattle.
Often videos of the attacks go viral on social media and are shown, albeit in pixellated form, on India’s many rolling TV channels – including, in one case, victims covered in blood and pleading for their lives.
The Gujarat incidents prompted police to issue a press release, urging people not to “get carried away by fake social media messages”.