By IANS
Patna : In two shocking incidents, three men were lynched in Bihar Monday in growing instances of “street justices” in the state.
Two men were severely beaten up and shot by an angry mob near Bakhtiyarpur in Patna district as the men were trying to flee on a motorcycle after shooting a villager.
The police said two youth on motorcycles shot a man allegedly over an old land dispute. While they were attempting to escape after shooting, they were surrounded by angry villagers, who thrashed and then shot them.
“Angry mob of villagers beat them and later shot them as instant justice for the crime they had committed,” a senior police official said.
The local administration has deployed security forces in the village as tensions ran high after the incident.
Meanwhile in another incident, a crowd beat a man to death after he allegedly killed a minor boy in Shampur Santhali Tola village in Munger district.
According to the police, Chetan Soren, in his 20s, shot a five-year-old boy, Babulal Tudu, in a drunken stupor.
“Villagers caught him as he was running away after the incident and beat him to death,” police official Vishwanath Prasad said.
The police have lodged a report against unidentified people for lynching Soren.
The latest incident comes barely weeks after a similar lynching of a man suspected of murdering a man in Hajipur of Vaishali district.
In rural Bihar, “street justice” is becoming increasingly common. Last year, over three dozen cases of lynching were reported and many more have gone unreported.
The worst lynching case was reported in September last year when 10 people from the underprivileged Kueri community in Vaishali district were beaten to death over an alleged theft. Later, a high-level probe found that the men were not thieves as the villagers had suspected.