Man suspected of transporting beef lynched in Nashik

NASHIK: Suspecting them of carrying beef, a group of 15 people accosted two men who were transporting 450kg meat in a car, killing one of them and beating the other with iron rods and sticks in Maharashtra's Nashik rural district Saturday. Eleven people were arrested.
The slain man has been identified as Afaan Abdul Majid Ansari, a 32-year-old resident of Qureshi Nagar in Mumbai's Kurla.He and his friend Nasir Hussain Shaikh were alive when police reached the spot on being informed about the attack. They were being taken to a hospital, where Ansari died while the condition of Shaikh, also a Kurla resident, is said to be stable. Based on Shaikh's complaint, police registered an FIR.
The duo was carrying about 450kg of meat in a Maruti Swift car from Ahmednagar to Mumbai when the crowd stopped them, barely 25km from the spot where two cattle transporters were beaten up by a mob on June 8. One of them was found dead on June 10. Police had arrested six people in that case.
The meat in the car has been sent for a forensic test "to find out if it was buffalo meat or beef", Nashik Rural deputy SP Sunil Bhamre said.
According to Nashik Rural SP Shahaji Umap, police scanned CCTV footage and zeroed in on the suspects based on their mobile phone location. He said Shaikh had told police that when they reached a toll gate in Sinnar, someone spotted the meat in the car and that cascaded into an attack a while later. "We are investigating who at Sinnar could have alerted the attackers," the SP said.