Visuals show a man in a white baniyan and veshti, crying as a group of other men assault him with sticks and bare hands. A man can be seen yanking the victim’s baniyan. One man approaches him with a wooden stick and another man uses a whip to attack him. The attack is so brutal that the victim’s head is bent and he is crying, trying to put his undone veshti back on.
These disturbing visuals are from Kollam, where a violent mob brutally attacked a young man identified as Shamnad, after mistaking him to be a ‘bike thief’. The attack took place on January 24, Sunday. The resident of Mylapure in Kollam’s Mukhathala block, says he was returning from his place of work when he asked two men on a bike for a lift back home. Shamnad adds that on their way to his house, the bike collided with a car and the two men, who were later found to have stolen the bike, ran away, leaving Shamnad stranded with the bike.
It was following this that the mob of men gathered and attacked him. Two days later, the attackers even released visuals of his assault on social media, misleading the entire neighbourhood into thinking that he was a ‘bike thief’.
“I can’t even step out of my house. They used broads sticks and hit me. I can still feel big lumps on the back of my head from their attack,” says the victim who is 20 years old. According to reports, post the attack, Shamnad lost his job and has been wrongly labelled as a thief in his area, resulting in him not finding any work.
On January 24, Shamnad was taken into police custody following the attack. However, the police had not taken any action against the mob that attacked him.
TNM got in touch with officers of the Kottiyam Police station who confirmed that it was only on Wednesday, January 27, three days after the attack, that the mob had been booked.
“They have been booked under sections 143 (unlawful assembly), 144 (joining unlawful assembly armed with deadly weapon), 147 (rioting) among other sections of the Indian Penal Code,” an officer from the Kottiyam police station told TNM.
The two men on the bike with Shamnad, who were identified as having committed theft of the bike, were arrested by the Parippally police and have been remanded to judicial custody. Shamnad was released from police custody on January 24. However, the police had failed to take action against the brutal mob attack on the same day. Instead, Shamnad says, the police were investigating whether the 20-year-old had actually stolen the bike, even after he was released from custody.
“He says that he has not stolen the bike, but he was part of the group who had stolen the vehicle. On Wednesday, we also booked the mob which attacked him,” the officer added.
Shamnad has now written to the Kollam City Police Commissioner regarding the incident and apathy extended by the Kottiyam police.
In Kasargod, a mob chased a 47-year-old man after a woman accused him of sexually harassing her. The man identified as Rafeeq died later from a cardiac arrest. The incident took place near a private hospital in Kasargod town on Saturday afternoon.
Among the most infamous cases of of mob lynching in Kerala happened in February 2018, a tribal man from Attapadi who was accused of theft was brutally lynched by a mob. The 30-year-old collapsed inside the police jeep and died while being taken to a hospital. His killers had also clicked a selfie with him minutes before his death, which triggered widespread outrage in the state.