Two persons, one of them a mentally challenged man, were severely beaten up by mobs in Kashmir Valley on Friday on suspicion of being braid-choppers.
A police spokesman said the mentally challenged youth, Wasim Ahmad Tantray, a resident of Sopore’s Shakwara, was critically injured when a mob attacked him near the town’s Fruit Mandi.
“Miscreants burnt hay in a bid to set the person on fire believing he was a braid-chopper. Some others tried to run a tractor over him. A First Information Report (FIR) has been lodged,” said the police.
The condition of the victim, who was taken to a Srinagar hospital, was stated “to be critical.”
In another similar incident of mistaken identity, an unidentified person had a narrow escape at the Hazratbal shrine after morning prayers when “there was an attempt to throw him into the lake”, said the police.
The incident triggered violent clashes between the protesters and security forces.
Locals alleged “attacks on women in the area are on the rise.”
The Sopore incident, shot on cameras and circulated online, evoked a massive outrage on social media, with Valley-based netizens calling for “a more proactive role by the government agencies to arrest the trend.”
“The Sopore incident, bone-chilling as it is, is only the latest. No braid-chopper has been apprehended so far but numerous innocent persons have become the victims of our collective criminal behaviour. Neither Kashmir’s ethos nor the teachings of the religion that we claim to be following allows, much less recommends, the kind of behaviour that we display,” said State Public Works Minister and government spokesman Nayeem Akhtar.
Several leaders from the mainstream and separatist camps have asked people to desist from attacking people.
“Any suspicious person should be handed over to local mosque committees,” said a joint statement issued by separatist leaders Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik.
Scores of Valley colonies and villages have set up night patrols of local youth to “nab the attackers.”
