By the time police arrived in the hamlet of Rainpada on July 1, 2018, the village council office was the scene of a massacre.

The bright blue shutters on the windows were splintered and the door was kicked in. Inside, files were strewn across the floor and the light green walls were splashed with blood. Five men were dead, beaten to death with fists, feet, sticks, and office furniture wielded by a raging mob.

The dead men—four in their late forties and one whose age remains unknown—had arrived in Rainpada earlier that day, at around 9 am, on a bus from Solapur, some 300 miles south, to attend a Sunday market. According to their families and police, all of them were members of a Nath Panthi Davari Gosavi tribe, a nomadic group that roams India’s western Maharashtra state, surviving mostly on alms. The men sat under a tree not far from where they had gotten off the bus and, as they ate, handed a biscuit to a young girl.

Six weeks later, Hemant Patil, the assistant police inspector for Dhule district, in which Rainpada is located, explains how this seemingly innocuous gesture had enormous consequences. For about a week before the men arrived, rumors circulated on the messaging system WhatsApp warning of bands of kidnappers roving the area and infiltrating villages to snatch young children. In one particularly grim version of the rumor, the children’s organs—kidneys and hearts—were harvested and sold.

As Patil, a veteran officer with a flat-top haircut and thick mustache, speaks, he begins swiping through gruesome crime scene photos stored on his phone before coming to a video that officers believe helped stoke fear and unease. It shows photos of pale, lifeless children laid out in rows, half covered with sheets. A voiceover warns parents to be vigilant and on the lookout for child snatchers.

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

The photos are not fake, but they don’t show the victims of a murderous Indian kidnapping ring either. The pictures are of children who were killed in Syria during a chemical attack on the town of Ghouta in August 2013, five years earlier and thousands of miles away.

The men’s interaction with the girl quickly attracted attention. Soon a crowd began to gather with people demanding answers from the men. “They started to ask them ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where did you come from?’ ‘How did you get here?’” Patil says, growing more animated as his retelling of the confrontation builds. “The quarrel began there.” The men, who were already being beaten by the crowd, were brought to the panchayat—the village office—by some concerned village bystanders and locked inside for their own protection. Over the next 40 minutes, a mob outside the building swelled into the thousands. A few people attempted to quell the crowd, but the effort was ultimately unsuccessful and people stormed the office.

The killings were widely described in the news media as “lynchings,” but the phrase belies the frenzy of violence that unfolded. Videos published by local media outlets show men stomping on one of the victims as he pleads for help. Two other men lift chairs above their heads then bring them crashing down, repeatedly striking the injured man. One chair can be seen breaking apart from the force of the blows. “They were brutally murdered,” Patil says flatly.

Police were dispatched from Pimpalner, a town about 25 miles away, just after 11 am. They arrived almost an hour later, but any hope of saving the men had by then passed. Villagers were so enraged and convinced of the men’s guilt that they wanted to burn the bodies rather than turn them over to authorities.