On Thursday morning, Imrana, Nayab, Uzma, and Samreen, their eyes swollen from grief, were mourning the death of their only brother, Mohammad Ishaq, outside their one-room house with their father, Abdul Wajid.
On Tuesday, September 26, a Hindu mob lynched to death Mohammad Ishaq, a 23-year-old Muslim man, alleging that he had eaten Prasad from a makeshift temple tent in Sundar Nagri, Northeast Delhi.
Prasad, in Hindu religion, is a devotional offering made to a god, typically consisting of food that is later shared among devotees.
A viral video of the incident shows that Ishaq was tied to a pole with a leather belt and beaten mercilessly for allegedly stealing a banana meant for Prasad. The video shows the victim crying and pleading for his life.
Ishaq was lynched to death in the vicinity of his house, some 200 meters away, between 4 am and 6 am on Tuesday. His family was informed of his death by a neighbor, Aamir, who was going to school the following day and found Ishaq’s body lying outside the locality. Aamir took Ishaq to his home in a rickshaw.
“That night we left him on the terrace to sleep, and we don’t know when he went out. He left home at night without informing us,” Abdul Wajid, the deceased’s father, a fruit seller, told Maktoob.
“The innocent soul didn’t know that this could be his last outing. If we had known, we would never have let him go outside at any cost,” said Wajid as he burst into tears.
“He was my most obedient child,” he said. “He used to obey everything I said and would never say no to any work.”
Killed ‘without letting him drink water, “toenails plucked, eyes swelled out”
Ishaq’s eldest sister, Imrana, told Maktoob that communal hatred towards Muslims had killed her brother.
“Why would anyone kill someone for eating a banana?” she asked. “Every religion spends money on food during festivals. Was that one banana worth my brother’s life?”
“It was hate that killed him,” she added.
“We saw in a video that he was asking for water while they were thrashing him, but nobody even poured water in his mouth,” the sisters said. “They were pouring water on the ground but didn’t give him to drink.”
This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here