E-Paper
Video of man being burnt in Manipur goes viral; govt says incident of May 4
The seven-second video which showed a man wearing black shirt and camouflage pants with injury marks on his head lying down near a barbed wire.
The Manipur government on Monday informed that the video of a man being burnt, which surfaced a day ago, was that of an incident that took place in early May in Kuki-dominated Kangpokpi district.
Addressing a press conference in Manipur capital Imphal, security advisor to the Manipur government Kuldiep Singh said that the incident is related to an earlier viral video of two Kuki women who were paraded naked and raped.
The seven-second video which showed a man wearing black shirt and camouflage pants with injury marks on his head lying down near a barbed wire while a portion of his body was getting burnt. Voices of people, apparently standing near him, as well as gunshots can be heard in the background.
It’s not clear whether the man was burnt alive, or he was already dead before being burnt. “The name of the person (in the video is) Laldinthanga Khongsai, aged 37 years...resident of Paokongching village in Kangpokpi district,” Singh said.
He mentioned that the incident apparently took place on May 4, a day after ethnic clashes started. Singh informed that the body of the victim, a Kuki, is now lying at the morgue in Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences in Imphal.
“It has been requested by the DGP to hand over this case to the CBI as this case is also a sequel of that incident in which two persons were killed and two women were paraded naked, the video of which went viral,” Singh said.
In July, a video of two women who were paraded naked by a large mob and one of them later allegedly gang raped had surfaced sparking widespread condemnation. The police had arrested seven persons related to the incident and investigation of the case was transferred to CBI in August.
Reacting to the video, Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF), a Kuki organisation termed the incident as “shocking and barbaric” and blamed that the state government of being “selection in application of justice”.
“The video is a harrowing testament to the ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kuki-Zo community by the majority Meiteis,” ITLF said in a statement released on Monday.
