Madhya Pradesh: 4 teenagers in Ratlam made to dip hands in boiling oil to trace lost mobile phone
According to the police, the act was motivated by superstition that only the hands of the thief would be burnt while doing so and nothing would happen to others who were innocent.
In a gory incident in village Narsinghpara of Ratlam district, a 40-year-old man forced four teenagers to dip their hands in a boiling hot vegetable oil to find out if they had stolen his son's mobile phone.
According to the police, the act was motivated by superstition that only the hands of the thief would be burnt while doing so and nothing would happen to others who were innocent.
Chagan Baria, who lives in Narsingpara under the Revati Police Station on Monday evening realised that his 13-year-old son had lost his mobile phone while playing with his friends. Baria rounded off four kids - all teenagers - who were playing with his son and asked for the lost mobile phone. All kids, however, denied taking the phone after which Baria took all of them to his house and heated vegetable oil in a pot.
Once the oil reached its boiling point, he asked the teenagers to dip their hands in it one by one, saying if they were innocent nothing would happen to them. "Only the guilty would burn his hands," he is reported to have told them.
The prediction of the superstition, however, failed and all the four boys rushed to their families with burnt hands.
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Family members on the advise of village elders rushed them to the Revati community health centre where they were admitted with burn injuries late in the night.The doctor at the health centre informed the police following which a team was sent to the village on Tuesday morning. By the time police reached the village, Baria had fled.
Baria was later caught in a nearby village. "Baria told us that he had heard from someone that a thief can be caught by making him go through the boiling oil test. It appears he genuinely believed in this and we decided to parade him in the village, so that no one else falls prey to similar superstitious things in the future," Revati Police Station in-charge Ram Singh Rathore said while talking to India today.
Baria has been booked under Section 324 of the Indian Penal Code and has been remanded to judicial custody.
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