'He looked like a terrorist!' How a drive in rural India ended in a mob attack and a lynching Zeba Siddiqui, Euan Rocha, Rajendra Jadhav, Sankalp Phartiyal 8 Min Read MURKI/MUMBAI, India (Reuters) - In the tiny hamlet of Murki in the hinterlands of south India, Inspector V.B. Yadwad surveyed a pile of bricks and stones in a ditch where he and other police officers had been attacked earlier this month while trying to save a group of five men on a road trip from a violent mob. “We tried hard to stop them,” said Yadwad, pointing to injuries on his back. “They wouldn’t listen to anyone.” Yadwad was one of eight policemen who rushed to the village on July 13 to try to control a mob of more than 200 that attacked the five friends, wrongly assuming they were child kidnappers. The vicious assault left one of the five men, Mohammed Azam, a UK-educated IT worker from India’s tech hub in Hyderabad, dead, and at lest two of the others badly beaten. All eight officers were injured, two seriously. Azam, who was 32 and worked for global consulting services firm Accenture ACN.N, is one of the latest victims of a wave of lynchings in India, as ill-equipped and outnumbered police struggle to contain mob violence triggered by false messages about child kidnappings spread via platforms like Facebook’s FB.O WhatsApp messaging service, which is very popular in India. The Indian government says it is not tracking data for lynchings, but data portal IndiaSpend has tallied more than 30 deaths from nearly 70 such incidents since January 2017. ... ctd https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...-in-a-mob-attack-and-a-lynching-idUSKBN1KJ09R ------- It's interesting how social media is feeding into ignorance and radicalism. I can't help but see this as indicative of a wider trend and comparable in a way to how the "alt-right" has grown in the US. This particular incident is reminiscent of that "pizza-gate" incident, where allegations of a child sex ring being run out of a pizza shot led to an armed wingnut showing up there to "investigate." With how crazy social media can get and how this can affect its users, it's tempting to compare it all to the danger of yelling "fire!" in a crowded venue.
"It's interesting how social media is feeding into ignorance and radicalism. I can't help but see this as indicative of a wider trend and comparable in a way to how the "alt-right" has grown in the US. This particular incident is reminiscent of that "pizza-gate" incident, where allegations of a child sex ring being run out of a pizza shot led to an armed wingnut showing up there to "investigate." No kidding..
