In a horrific incident, a video of has emerged in the lynching incident of Hyderabad-based techie Mohammed Azam Usmansab. The video shows the mob dragging an injured and bloodied Azam with ropes tied on hands. Policemen also seen trying to handle the mob with pleading hands but to no one’s success. The mob consists of at least 50 or more people, including women.
Twenty-eight-year-old Azam, father of a two-year-old, was a software engineer with Accenture and currently deployed on a Google project. The Hyderabad techie was lynched near Bidar on July 13 following a video message on WhatsApp which had a message, saying that three children were kidnapped by strangers who lured them into accepting chocolates, biscuits and other toys. It also said that a gang of 400 kidnappers have come to Bengaluru for child trafficking.
A police officer, requesting anonymity, said the video, showing some persons allegedly confessing to the kidnapping of children, was the reason behind the lynching of the techie. A total of 30 persons, including the administrator of a WhatsApp group that spread the rumours and the person who shot the pictures of the attack and circulated it, have been arrested.
The officer said a special awareness drive has been launched in the district asking people not to rely on WhatsApp forwards and take the law into their hands, merely on suspicion of somebody being a child-trafficker.
Usmansab and his three friends had come to visit their friend Mohammed Bashir Afroz at Handikera village in Bidar yesterday.
On their way back to Hyderabad they stopped near a hamlet, probably with an intention to take pictures. On noticing some children, they offered some chocolates to them, police said. Locals mistook them for child-lifters and attacked them. By then their pictures got circulated on a WhatsApp group, resulting in more people gathering at the spot, they said.
They managed to escape but were caught near Murki village, as the crowd alerted their acquaintances there, and were badly beaten up. Police reached the spot, managed to bring the situation under control and shifted them to a hospital, but Usmansab died on the way, they said. The others have been hospitalised.