India school official beaten to death by angry mob after bodies of two students found in ditch

The bodies of two boys, aged seven and eight, were found near the Devendra Prasad Sinha School

India school official beaten to death by angry mob after bodies of two students found in ditch (IBN Live)

A school official in India has died after he was heavily beaten by an angry mob following the discovery of two dead pupils close to the school.

Devendra Prasad, director of the privately owned Devendra Prasad Sinha School, was rushed to hospital in a critical condition by police on Sunday, the Hindustan Times reports.

Pictures taken at the scene apparently show Prasad lying on the ground while a large group of men surround him, kicking him. The Times of India reported Prasad was also beaten with ‘lathis’ - heavy weapons made of iron-bound bamboo sticks. Six police officers were reportedly injured during their efforts to stop the violence.

Prasad later died at the Patna Medical College Hospital in India’s north eastern state of Bihar.

The mob had reportedly torched two school vehicles before the attack and set both rooms of the school on fire. An image of the one yellow school van showed it lying upturned on water-logged ground, with flames and smoke rising from the vehicle.

The attack happened in the village of Nirpur, in Nalanda, after two boys aged seven and eight, were found drowned in a ditch on Sunday morning, according to reports.

According to police, the boys had been part of a group of four that had been at the ditch.

“It appears they had gone there to relieve themselves when two of the group slipped and fell in the water [on Sunday] morning. It had rained yesterday and the water level in the ditch had risen,” Nalanda police superintendent Siddharth Mohan Jain told the newspaper.

The Times of India reports that many in the mob held Prasad responsible for the deaths of the children, with the children’s family members alleging the boys had been killed teachers in a “fit of rage”.

The newspaper reports Prasad had said before his attack that four students had run away from the school’s hostel on Saturday night, but that only two had returned in the early hours of Sunday. The missing two boys were later found drowned.

A post-mortem concluded the boys had died of asphyxiation. “While [this] possibility seems to be due to drowning, we are looking at the matter from all possible angles,” superintendent Jain told the Hindustan Times.