A man who took 20 children hostage after inviting them to a fake birthday party has been shot dead by police in India, while his wife has been beaten to death by an angry mob.
Armed police and a counter-terrorism unit were called to a village in the Farrukhabad district in western Uttar Pradesh to reports of an unfolding hostage situation on Thursday.
The children, varying in age from six months to 15 years, had gone to the home of a man named locally as Subhash Batham believing he was hosting a birthday party for his one-year-old daughter.
Batham, who had been accused of murder and was out on bail, then held the invitees hostage at gunpoint.
Officers tried to negotiate with Batham, and succeeded in convincing him to hand down the six-month-old to a villager from a balcony.
But he then opened fire, shooting from the house and injuring two police officers and a villager.
Police finally stormed the home after 10 hours, shooting Batham dead. All the children were rescued unharmed.
"On learning that he had firing capabilities and after his bomb-threats, all senior police officials decided to attack him," said Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police Om Prakash Singh.
"We tried entering the house...Subhash was killed during the encounter,” he told BBC News.
Local media reported that Batham’s wife and child were among those taken hostage in the incident, and that his wife was also injured during the shooting.
Nonetheless, locals are reported to have rushed into the home after the police operation was concluded and beaten the wife to death.
An investigation into the incident is ongoing and the man’s motive for taking hostages remains unclear, the Reuters news agency reported.
But Deepak Kumar Srivastava, a local news reporter, told the BBC that Batham appeared to have acted against the village as a whole in retaliation for the murder charge he was facing.
“He believed that locals were responsible for his arrest in the murder case and he wanted to take revenge,” Srivastava said.
India Today reported that Batham also had a grievance with the local authorities, and had written a letter complaining about their refusal to grant him government housing. In the letter, he said his house still had no toilet facilities - despite the central government’s claim that 100 per cent of India now has sanitation - and that his ill and elderly mother was forced to defecate in the open.
