Indian police yesterday said one person had been arrested after a mob stabbed a Muslim teenager to death on suspicion of carrying beef, an offense in many parts of the Hindu-majority country.
Cows are revered by Hindus and slaughtering them, as well as possession or consumption of beef, is banned in most Indian states, with some imposing life sentences for breaking the law.
Junaid Khan, 15, was on Friday traveling from New Delhi with three of his brothers when a fight erupted over seats.
Between 15 and 20 men pulled out knives and set upon the brothers while making anti-Muslim comments and insisting one of the packets they were carrying contained beef.
While Khan was stabbed to death, his brother Shakir sustained injuries on the throat, chest and hands, police said.
“The fight started over seats. We are looking into the matter and we have arrested one of the accused, who is a 35-year-old man from Haryana,” railway police official Ajay Kumar told reporters.
Khan’s brother Hassem told reporters the mob ignored their repeated pleas that they were not carrying any beef.
“They were pointing at a packet which had food and saying we should not be allowed to sit since we were carrying beef,” Haseem said.
The incident is the latest such attack by Hindu vigilantes in India, where there has been a spate of assaults against Muslims and Dalits.
In the past two years, nearly a dozen Muslim men have been killed across the country on suspicion of eating beef or smuggling cows.
Critics say vigilantes have been emboldened by the election in 2014 of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.
Modi last year criticized the cow protection vigilantes and urged a crackdown against groups using religion as a cover for committing crimes.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema