In a heart-wrenching incident, a 23-year-old migrant worker from West Bengal lost his life as a cow vigilante group beat him up to death in Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri earlier this week over alleged beef consumption.

According to the First Information Report (FIR), a group of miscreants came to the victim, Sabir’s residence, a scrap dealer, asking him to accompany them to buy some scrap from the Badhra bus stand on the afternoon of August 27. The goons also called another migrant, Assam native Asiruddin, to the bus stand and allegedly beat up the duo there. The goons took the victims to some other area when the onlookers intervened, and continued thrashing him.

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However, while Sabir was later found dead near a canal, Asiruddin was found dumped at another location and is currently undergoing treatment in a hospital. The victim’s uncle, Babar Ali Mallik said that Sabir went with those who called him but did not return on August 27, and the following day, he received a phone call from police informing him that Sabir’s body had been recovered from a nearby region, saying that the victim had been lynched by unknown persons.

“We have a few relatives in the area and they later identified one of the suspects as someone belonging to a cow vigilante group. That person had previously threatened them for having meat. As my nephew was speaking Bengali, he was falsely suspected to be a Bangladeshi,” Babar spoke to The Telegraph. Sabir had been living at Badhra in Haryana with his wife and working as a scrap collector for the past three years.

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The Haryana police have started a murder case in the incident, based on a complaint filed by a relative of Sabir blaming the alleged cow vigilantes for the horrific crime.

Chairman of the West Bengal Migrant Workers’ Development Board, Samirul Islam, condemned the incident, saying it has become a threat for migrant workers from Bengal to work in BJP-ruled states. “Speaking Bengali in states like BJP-run Haryana or Odisha is dangerous as aggressive groups like cow vigilantes consider them Bangladeshis. We demand that people of Bengal, across party lines, come together to protest against such brutality,” the media house quoted Samirul Islam.