Araria: Tension erupted in north Bihar‘s Forbesganj town on Thursday, April 9, when a pickup van driver was beheaded by a roadside vendor, who ended up being thrashed by locals and succumbed to injuries at a hospital, an official said.
According to Jitendra Kumar, Superintendent of Police (SP) of Araria district, which is headquartered at Forbesganj, the incident took place in the morning when Nabi Hussain, who drove a pick-up vehicle, quarreled with Ravi Chauhan.
“Chauhan used to sell sattu (roasted gram flour) at a local market where he picked up a quarrel with Hussain and attacked him with a dagger, which has been seized by police”, the SP said.
He added, “Onlookers caught hold of Chauhan and thrashed him until he was rescued by a police party, which rushed to the spot upon hearing about the incident. Chauhan was taken to a hospital where he succumbed to injuries. The bodies of both the deceased have been sent for post-mortem examination. Further investigations were on.”
Meanwhile, images of Hussain’s severed head, lying on the street, apparently captured by onlookers on their phones, have gone viral on social media.
One such image was shared on X by the leader of the opposition, Tejashwi Yadav.
Yadav slammed the government for the “horrific state of affairs” in Bihar and described the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) rule as “a messed-up regime.”
“A man publicly slit another man’s throat right in the middle of the market and roamed around with his severed head amidst hundreds of people. Later, the family of the deceased murdered the killer in turn,” he alleged.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) national working president also accused the police of “scrambling to save their own skins” during the chaos.
“This incident shows the degraded state of the law-and-order situation in Bihar. While the ruling coalition leaders are engrossed in the game of musical chairs for the ‘CM seat’, incidents of loot, murder, and rape are rising every day in Bihar,” he claimed.
He alleged that the NDA government in Bihar is lost in the “haze of sand and liquor mafias.”
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi will come back for elections five years later and speak about ‘jungle raj’ while the situation here in Bihar is pathetic at present,” Yadav said.
He also alleged that the incident was inspired by a “recent propaganda film,” without naming it.
“The poison that the BJP government is injecting into society through its propaganda is heart-wrenching,” he alleged.
