India arrests over rape suspect lynching

[alp227]

Source: BBC

Police in north-eastern India say they have arrested 18 people in connection with the lynching of a suspected rapist who was taken from prison by a mob.

Farid Khan was stripped naked by the crowd, beaten and dragged through the streets before being hanged in Dimapur, the main city in Nagaland state.

Hundreds of policemen have been patrolling the streets of Dimapur since the incident amid increasing tension.

A curfew was also imposed in the city on Sunday to maintain peace.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-31792402

[Joe Johns]

1. This...

is fucked up.

[rpannier]

2. Interesting part of the story

Police say Khan was a Bengali-speaking Muslim trader from neighbouring Assam state. He was arrested in February on charges of raping a 19-year-old tribal woman several times.

snip

But correspondents say the killing is also linked to rising ethnic tensions in Nagaland, whose indigenous tribespeople have blamed migrants from neighbouring Assam state and Bangladesh for settling on their lands.

link: see OP

[brett_jv]

3. I was kinda set to cheer the mob on just a tiny little bit ...

Not that I support extra-judicial vigilante killings are a general rule, but ... it's not everyday you hear of rapists being held to account quite like this in India ...

Now it turns out to NOT just be simple revenge for the horrific suffering of the young woman.

That's too bad. The whole thing, really.

[CBGLuthier]

4. You know the US equivalent would be if they dragged a Mexican from a cell in the US and lynched him.

not a damned thing to even remotely cheer about either someone who has not had a trial or someone who was probably murdered for being a foreigner and one with a different religion being murdered.

[IronLionZion]

5. Do they know if he's even the guilty one?

Sometimes it's a case of he looks like the type of undesirable who might do such a thing, so let's lynch him just in case. And even here on DU, since there have been some high profile horrifying rape cases from India, some DUers have started to subconsciously associate Indian people with rape.


Plenty of this nonsense happened in the US south before the civil rights movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

[JI7]

6. this is the most important part, the attack had nothing to do with rape, and it's unlikely the mob

gives a shit about rape itself .

they went after him because he was a muslim . then went on to attack other people and places that are owned by muslims.