A day after a video of young men dangerously brandishing machetes and knives at a railway station surfaced on social media, Chennai police told The News Minute that four students of Presidency College have been arrested.
According to the investigating officer, the students were caught just as they were exiting the Hindu College station on Monday at 4 pm. This was after members of the public informed the police on seeing them create a nuisance with sharp weapons in hand.
Videos of multiple boys, hanging on precariously to the local train, brandishing long knives and metallic rods dangerously before shouting 'Pachayappa' (the name of a prominent college in Chennai) caused panic on social media.
The two videos were uploaded on Facebook by a student named Bharathiraja on Monday evening.
The 'students' were also seen standing on top of government buses and even bursting firecrackers on the railway platform.
The profile of the student who had uploaded the video had said that he was a student of the college and the post had got many comments from other students applauding the 'brave feat'.
When TNM had contacted the railway police earlier, the Public Relations Officer M Boopathy admitted that the videos were alarming, but they weren’t enough to file a case. "The videos could have been taken even a year back and may have been circulated now," he explains. "We don't know which station it is or if those students even really belong to Pachayappa's college," he added.
Georgy George, the Superintendent of Government Railway Police in Chennai said if the video is new, patrolling at stations will have to be increased:
In general, a night, the possibility of offences is higher, we try to march maximum during night time. Whenever there is increase in crowd, we try to put more people on duty. So, if students are travelling like this on the trains, then it becomes a priority area for us, so we divert more people in that area.
(This article was originally published in The News Minute. It has been edited for length.)
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