Photographs and videos on social media of an enraged mob that seized a man accused of rape from a jail in the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland, dragged him through the streets and beat him to death helped lead to the arrests of 22 people over the weekend, the authorities said.
The police identified 200 to 300 people who had either been involved in the violence that erupted in the city of Dimapur on Thursday or helped incite it, according to Wabang Jamir, a police inspector general in Kohima, the capital of Nagaland. More arrests were likely in the coming days, Mr. Jamir said, adding that it was unclear whether some of those arrested belonged to organized groups.
Another senior police official, Akheto Sema, said the thousands of people who descended on the jail were “a frenzied, leaderless, headless mob.”
A curfew was imposed in Dimapur, and the authorities, saying that they wished to prevent the spread of “rumors,” blacked out mobile Internet and text services throughout Nagaland.
The Nagaland police said that the man accused of rape, whom Mr. Jamir identified as Syed Sarif Khan — other reports rendered his name somewhat differently — came from the neighboring Indian state of Assam.
A brother of Mr. Khan in Assam, speaking to the news channel NDTV, said that his brother was an Indian citizen and denied that the woman had been attacked. Mr. Jamir, however, said that a medical report indicated rape. He also said that the Assam police should help look into Mr. Khan’s origins.
“I hope they will because right now we have a law-and-order situation on our hands, so there are limits to the speed at which we can do the investigation,” Mr. Jamir said.
The killing screamed from the front pages of newspapers and flashed across screens all over India, a gruesome example of the often fierce collective response to allegations of sexual assault.
It occurred days after the Indian government banned a BBC documentary about a 2012 gang rape and murder, yet the deadly outburst in Dimapur seemed to be conflated with tensions, growing over the past few years in the overwhelmingly tribal and Christian state of Nagaland, over the rising numbers of mostly Muslim migrants, and the suspicion that some of the outsiders were connected to crimes.
The seizure and beating of Mr. Khan, recorded by spectators on their smartphones, also demonstrated the ineffectual response of the police, who opened fire, killing a protester, only after Mr. Khan had been killed.
Police officials said that officers outside the jail did not fire on the crowd because there were many young students in its ranks. It remained unclear how the mob entered the jail and took Mr. Khan. Two police officials and a district administrative official in Dimapur were suspended on Friday.
Though there was no specific religious overtone to the killing, Ahidur Rahman, a leader of the Muslim Council of Dimapur, said that a “few hundred” Muslim families had fled Dimapur in its wake.
Mr. Jamir, the police inspector general, denied that Muslims were departing in any significant numbers. But Mr. Rahman insisted that the railway station was full of people, bags packed and hoping to catch night trains, and that his group had deployed its youth wing to persuade them not to leave.
Source: NYTimes