Police track, counsel man after he tweets about suicide

The man, Akshay Pawar Patil, a native of Satara, posted a thread on Twitter at 7.18pm on Friday, saying that he was about to take his life and wanted to donate his organs after his death. The thread went into detail how he had consistently failed in every venture

Mumbai: The Mumbai police tracked down a 31-year-old man after he posted a series of tweets saying he was planning to end his life and counselled him in the early hours of Saturday.

Police track, counsel man after he tweets about suicide

The man, Akshay Pawar Patil, a native of Satara, posted a thread on Twitter at 7.18pm on Friday, saying that he was about to take his life and wanted to donate his organs after his death. The thread went into detail how he had consistently failed in every venture.

Even as scores of people responded to Patil, trying to dissuade him from taking extreme step, the tweets were brought to the police’s attention and the Crime Branch immediately reached out to the Mumbai Cyber police. Within an hour, the police traced him to Karjat railway station based on the internet protocol (IP) address of the mobile phone from which the tweets were posted.

“Patil had posted his own pictures along with the tweets. We immediately dispatched a team from Unit V to the railway station. They scoured the station premises till they found a young man corresponding to the picture in the tweets. He was taken into custody and brought to the Unit at around 7am,” a senior Crime Branch officer said.

Patil told the police that despite having studied up to Class 12 in science stream, he had fallen on hard times and was earning a living by selling chikki at Karjat railway station. He said that he had incurred heavy debts, which he was unable to repay.

“We contacted the man’s mother and she came to Mumbai immediately. The man was counselled at length and we also advised his mother to arrange professional help for him, after which they left for Satara,” Prashant Kadam, deputy commissioner of police (detection), said.

According to Patil’s tweets, he had to leave his education after Class 12 and take up a job, but soon started his own business after taking a loan. While the business failed, he still managed to pay off his debts, but had to borrow money again when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and his father was seriously ill. Patil then started a tea vending business, but his own employees cheated him out of money, and he kept slipping further into debt.

In one of his tweets, Patil described how he had managed to raise around ₹20,000 through crowdfunding on Twitter, but the amount was barely enough to cover the interest on his loans.

The incident came just two days after the Crime branch, based on an Interpol alert, prevented a Jogeshwari resident from taking his life. The man was searching online for ‘painless ways to die’, which was flagged by the National Central Bureau (NCB) of the US and communicated to the Indian government through Interpol.