Mobs Show Deadly Fear Of Child-Snatching Innocent People Beaten To Death By Crowds That Fear Children Will Be Kidnapped, Sold

On a sultry June afternoon, a group of children played hide-and-seek on their Chapulia village playground while the adults worked in nearby rice fields.

An 8-year-old girl, blindfolded for the game, stumbled over a stranger. When the woman tried to pick her up, the other children screamed - afraid their friend was about to be kidnapped.

Men abandoned their work and a frenzied mob pounced on the 45-year-old stranger, beating her and a man traveling with her. The two were in town looking for work; both died Tuesday on the way to the hospital.

Eighteen people have been beaten to death in less than a month, police say, and 50 more have been injured in similar incidents nationwide. Most were women - and most later were exonerated of any ill intent.

Mob attacks on strangers, inspired by fears of child-snatching, have been reported in a variety of poor countries and often seem unfounded. The fear flourishes in Bangladesh, where the Center for Women and Children Studies, a women’s rights group, says as many as 400 women and children are smuggled out of the country and sold into prostitution or labor.

Police have no centralized record of how many women and children have become victims, and have blamed the media for fueling panic.

But according to Abdus Salam, a farmer, police can’t be trusted to arrest offenders. “Police always come late - long after the kidnapping occurs,” Salam said. “They are also no good in recovering the missing children.”

“How can we trust strangers?” asked Mohammad Hakim, a 30-year-old farmer from Chapulia, about 45 miles north of the capital, Dhaka. “Two schoolchildren disappeared from our village in just one month.”

Police have had trouble making arrests for mob beatings. “It’s not easy to take action when almost everyone in an area is involved in such attacks,” said Ashrafur Rahman, a police officer in Narayanganj, 10 miles south of Dhaka.

Abdullah Al Mamoon, an 11-year-old boy from Narayanganj, recently led police to an abandoned building where he said he had been held prisoner for 28 days with 40 other children. Police found nothing and were skeptical of the boy’s story, but it created panic in the town.

So, they circulated leaflets meant to keep travelers safe: “If you happen to be a stranger in an unknown neighborhood, please don’t talk to children or offer them candy.”