{"id":46791,"date":"2018-07-15T15:45:13","date_gmt":"2018-07-15T10:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/?p=46791"},"modified":"2018-07-15T15:48:17","modified_gmt":"2018-07-15T10:18:17","slug":"mob-kills-engineer-fake-whatsapp-rumour-karnataka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/india-news\/mob-kills-engineer-fake-whatsapp-rumour-karnataka\/","title":{"rendered":"Mob kills IT Engineer for fake WhatsApp rumour in Karnataka"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to police the mob frenzy started after the man from Qatar was seen distributing chocolates to the local children leaving their school. The police have arrested 32 people.<\/p>\n

The IT engineer, Mohammad Azam, had gone for a drive on Friday with three others when they were stopped at the roadside. Mr Azam’s friend Mohammad Salam, who was from Qatar, was seen handing chocolates to children.<\/p>\n

Due to rumours of child lifting in the area and seeing the chocolates being handed out to the school children, residents of a nearby village, Murki, sent messages on a WhatsApp group. Panicked after seeing a large crowd while someone taking their video, the men got into their car and drove away. Some of the villagers chased them on motorcycles. During the course speeding car hit one of the motorcycles and fell into a culvert.<\/p>\n

The crowd dragged the men out of the car and brutally beaten up, said eye witnesses. There are reports of crowd throwing stones on the occupants of the car. Nearby villagers also joined the unruly crowd. None came to their rescue. By the time the police arrived, Mohammad Azam had died. The others were taken to the hospital in Hyderabad.<\/p>\n

$\"Mob$ <\/a>Akram, the brother of the victim Mohammad Azam said, “They had gone out for a drive. My brother gave chocolates to children. We don’t know what their parents thought but several villagers gathered and beat them. How can they think they were kidnappers?” He also appealed the government to stop mob killings saying, “My brother was a software engineer, father of a 2-year-old. He was just a regular guy”.<\/p>\n

The incident occurred when the group, while on their visit to a local lake, halted for lunch in Adhikera on the outskirts of Bidar. One of them Ismail, who returned from Qatar recently, offered chocolates to school girls. But the locals questioned and mistook them for child lifters.<\/p>\n

The accompanying three persons, the cousins and friends of Mr Azam, were badly injured. Basheer has reportedly been fighting for his survival at a local hospital.<\/p>\n

Reports say that among the 32 arrested for the killing, one is the administrator of the particular WhatsApp group involved in spreading rumour. There arrestees also include women.<\/p>\n

More than 20 people have been killed across India over\u00a0fake WhatsApp rumours. The last such incident took place in Maharashtra’s Dhule, where five people were killed. The WhatsApp videos that had triggered the attack were fake – one of them was a five-year-old video from Syria that had photographs of children who died in a nerve gas attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In gruesome mob frenzy a 32-year-old software engineer was beaten to death and three others, one of them a Qatari national, were seriously injured over WhatsApp-driven rumours of child kidnapping in Karnataka’s Bidar town on Friday. According to police the mob frenzy started after the man from Qatar was seen distributing chocolates to the local […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":46795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1497],"tags":[1601,2116],"yst_prominent_words":[9301,24217,15944,52911,52908,28811,37854,21004,9723,11192,4171,52907,4000,41111,4437,52909,21069,52910,4630,8712],"ppma_author":[140543],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/d2r2ijn7njrktv.cloudfront.net\/apnlive\/uploads\/2018\/07\/15152807\/Mob-kills-IT-Engineer-for-fake-WhatsApp-rumour-in-Karnataka.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":140543,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"apnnewsdesk","display_name":"APN Live","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/478eacb893eda88aa6ed8d99b005bf58?s=96&r=g"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46791"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=46791"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=46791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}