A mentally-challenged man was brutally thrashed by a mob at Kuarmunda panchayat under the Biramitrapur police station in Sundargarh district on Tuesday on suspicion of being a child-lifter.
The man hailing from Jharkhand had gone to Chataktola village, where rumours of child-lifting had surfaced earlier.
Seeing the mentally-ill youth roaming in the village, a group of locals detained him and beat him up suspecting him to be a child-lifter. The mob later handed the youth over to police.
Locals alleged that innocent people are falling prey to such rumours and being attacked frequently in several villages of the district. But the police and district administration have not taken any steps to control the situation.
Recently, two youth had been beaten up by locals over suspicion of child-lifting in Sector-6 here and the Kokerama area under Nuagaon block in the district.