An Indian politician who rode on a buffalo to draw attention to his campaign for an upcoming state election is set to be charged with animal cruelty, police said on Wednesday.
Mohammad Parvez Mansoori, who is contesting a legislative seat in Gaya in the eastern state of Bihar for the poll starting on Wednesday next week, said that he wanted to highlight pollution levels in the city by moving around on an animal rather than in a car or on a motorbike.
However, his stunt backfired, and authorities said that he had contravened guidelines from the Indian Election Commission not to use animals for campaigning.
Photo: AFP
“It was a clear cut case of cruelty to animals and a violation of guidelines,” said Uday Kumar, a local police officer.
Photos shared on social media showed Mansoori sitting on a buffalo draped with a yellow cloth surrounded by a crowd of people.
Kumar said that Mansoori, a candidate of the Rashtriya Ulama Council, a minor party, was on Tuesday arrested and briefly detained before being released. He would be charged with animal cruelty, Kumar added.
The poll in Bihar — which has 70 million voters — is set to be one of the biggest to take place worldwide since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The election commission has warned political parties to observe social distancing during campaigning, amid media reports of large, maskless crowds at rallies.
India has recorded more than 7.7 million COVID-19 cases, the second-highest number worldwide.
Bihar is run by a coalition of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and a regional party.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS