A 13-year-old boy from Uttar Pradesh (UP), India committed suicide on Sunday, August 27, night by hanging himself at his home following instructions of the lethal online game. It is being told that the teenager was playing the Blue Whale game that directs the player to commit suicide after 50 challenges, on his father’s mobile phone when the body was taken down; however, police are investigating into the matter to see if the game has anything to do with it. The victim, Parth Singh, belonging to Maudaha village of Hamirpur district of UP was a class 6th student at the Jaipuria Public School. On Sunday evening, Parth had his father’s mobile phone in his hand and was playing the Blue Whale game. He suddenly got up and went to his room and hung himself with the ceiling fan by keeping a chair over the bed. According to the family, Parth was playing a game on his father’s mobile phone for the past few days. When he was asked not to play, he started using his father’s mobile phone when he was not around or sleeping. However, no one from the family tried to find out what game he was playing. In a video of confession the boy is heard saying, “I have played only first level of Blue Whale but then I quit. I am very grateful to my college friends and parents because they have supported me very well. I can’t explain how much I am grateful to them. I am requesting those people to stop the game who are playing blue whale or planning for it.” “Blue Whale is not a game, it is a kind of trap. At first it is difficult to understand but after some days you will regret everything. It will be difficult for you to come out of the situation. It will force you to commit suicide. I am thankful that I controlled myself. I feel myself lucky. Not only my friends and parents but the CID too explained it to me very well,” the boy add Parth’s family members said, “A day back the boy told his father that he will complete the last level of the game soon and emerge victorious”. On that fateful day, Parth was supposed to attend his friend’s birthday party. He was preparing to go for the party since morning, told the mother. However, he locked himself in the room instead. When the boy did not open the door, his father, Vikram Singh, broke it open and found him hanging. “We are sending IT experts to go through the mobile records and history,” Maudaha circle officer (CO) Abhishek Yadav told a news agency. In a letter to all district police chiefs, the Director General of Police Sulkhan Singh had asked for complete compliance to the order of the Union Government banning the dangerous game. While Parth could not be saved from the clutches of the Blue Whale suicide game, a youth from Bengal being saved by his college friends, faculty and counsellors from the West Bengal police in a similar incident that took place on the same day. The young boy, an engineering student, had started playing the deadly Blue Whale game in early August after learning about it through a WhatsApp group. He even went on to carve a diagram of a whale on his arm, which is supposed to be the eighth stage of the game. The registrar of this boy’s engineering college got in touch with Rajesh Kumar, an officer from West Bengal Police’s CID, who had taken to spreading awareness about the game via Facebook, and informed about the boy’s suspicious behaviour. When Kumar realised that this boy was in danger and things had gotten too far, he started using their chat room as counselling sessions. He began talking him out of the challenge without the boy realizing it and went onto save his life. The boy is heard saying in his video of confession, “I have played only first level of Blue Whale but then I quit. I am very grateful to my college friends and parents because they have supported me very well. I can’t explain how much I am grateful to them. I am requesting those people to stop the game who are playing blue whale or planning for it.” “Blue Whale is not a game, it is a kind of trap. At first it is difficult to understand but after some days you will regret everything. It will be difficult for you to come out of the situation. It will force you to commit suicide. I am thankful that I controlled myself. I feel myself lucky. Not only my friends and parents but the CID too explained it to me very well,” the boy adds. In order to make the teenagers aware of the danger, a 1:13 minute video has been uploaded on West Bengal Police CID’s Facebook page. “My message to whoever is in this game is to stop it before it is too late. It is not a game…they give you challenges and they take you to places you cannot come back from. They drive you to suicide. You are compelled to… I didn’t reach that point” said the Kolkata boy. This is not the first incident to be reported in India in connection to the Blue Whale Challenge. Couple of days earlier, a class 10 boy from West Bengal’s Midnapore district killed himself by suffocating to death. Another incident saw a 14-year-old Mumbai boy jumping off the terrace of his home to win the Blue Whale Challenge. Till now the lethal online game has taken more than 100 lives around the world.
