In disturbing incident that took place amid the coronavirus situation, three persons were lynched by a 200-strong mob of villagers near Kasa town in Maharashtra’s Palghar district late on Thursday night, on suspicion that they were thieves.
In the second incident of its kind happening in the last three days, the villagers saw a Maruti Ecco van, carrying three persons near their village. They suspected the occupants of the van to be thieves.
The villagers first hurled stones at the van, prompting the driver to stop the vehicle. Later, they pulled three persons out of the vehicle and beat them to death in Gadhchinchale village on Dabhadi-Khanwel road, with sticks and rods.
The deceased ---identified as Chikne Maharaj Kalpavrukshagiri (70), Sushilgiri Maharaj (35) and driver Nilesh Telgade (30) were travelling to Nashik. Of them one was the diver, while two are residents of Kandivli in north Mumbai. The place where the incident took place is approximately 120 km from Mumbai.
When the incident was happening, the driver of the car quietly called the local police. Before long, a police team arrived on the scene. However, the villagers were in such a violent mood that they also attacked the police vehicle.
“We tried to rescue the three persons from being beaten up by the mob. The mob was violent. They attacked us with stones. Meanwhile, they beat the three persons very badly. We rushed to nearby government hospital where they were declared dead before admission. We are awaiting the post-mortem report,” Assistant Police Inspector attached to Kasa police station Anandrao Kale said.
On Friday, the police detained 30 persons in connection with the incident.
Meanwhile, the Kasa police have registered cases under section 188 (disobedience), section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Disaster Management Act, 2005, and Epidemic Diseases Act,1897 against unidentified villagers whom they expect to arrest in a day or two.
This is the second such incident during the last three days. Earlier, four police men Kasa Police station, including API Kale, were injured and a SUV of a skin specialist Dr Vishwas Walwi of Thane was badly damaged by a mob at Saami village Police said that some 250 people had attacked them Dr Walwi’s SUV when he was returning home after a door-to-door thermal screening of tribals and distributing food grains to them.
In a related development, Palghar district collector Kailas Shinde described the lynching incident as “most unfortunate”. Talking to media, Dr Shinde said: “It is very unfortunate that the villagers took law into their hands...The incident took place in a village on the border of Maharashtra and Dadra Nagar Haveli. In the earlier as well as the current incident, it appears that the villagers had apprehensions that the people were coming to their villages to take away kidneys, kidnap children and that these people were thieves and docoits".