Don’t take law into your hands: Police

Following at least three incidents of mob fury leading to lynching of innocent persons – one of which even resulted in the death of one person – in just a week, police in Kancheepuram have issued an advisory to the public, asking them not to take the law into their own hands. 

Police believe that the people started reacting in panic after a rumour that 200 people from north India were on the prowl in north Tamil Nadu to kidnap children started spreading through WhatsApp groups for the past two weeks. 

In the latest incident, two labourers from north India were assaulted by a group of local people on Sunday night, leaving one of them in a critical condition. Some of the children who were playing on Thayar Amman Koil Street in Kancheepuram saw two unfamiliar youth in the locality on Sunday evening. 

Suspecting them to be child kidnappers, they immediately alerted the elders in the neighbourhood, who surrounded the duo. While one of them managed to escape, the other person, identified as Harshad Kurjith (27) from Haryana, was thrashed by the mob, leaving him with serious injuries. Police said Kurjith, now admitted in the ICU at Chengalpattu medical college hospital, is critical. 

Police later said that he was a construction worker. In yet another incident in Kancheepuram, people even mistook two local auto drivers as child-lifters from north India – because they did not have moustaches. 

A group surrounded them on Alladi Thoppu Street in Kancheepuram, and before they could explain that they were local residents, they came under attack. One of them ran away, but R Deepak, a resident  of Sevlimedu, was thrashed mercilessly. Realising that the public have been reacting in panic that was triggered by rumours, the district police on Monday deployed two mobile public announcement systems to distribute handbills asking the public not to panic when they notice north Indian workers.

Urging the people not to believe in rumours, police asked them to inform the local police instead of resorting to mob justice. It may be recalled that on April 28 night, an unidentified man, believed from north India, was beaten up by a group of people after he was found siting near a child sleeping on the roadside. He was admitted to a Kancheepuram hospital. The next day, the youth was found dead on the road side, 500 metres away from the hospital.