Four men, including two Muslims and two Hindus, were brutally assaulted by a mob when they were transporting a dead buffalo in a truck for disposal on early Wednesday morning in Hathars district of Uttar Pradesh.

Timely action by the police, however, saved them from being lynched by cow vigilantes who though them of stealing cows from the village during on wee hours of Wednesday.

Videos of the incident have gone went viral on the social media.

The injured men told the police that they went to the village around 4 am to pick up a dead buffalo in a truck on the request of the owner to dispose it off. The moment they reached on the outskirt, villagers stopped their van, dragged them out and started thrashing them brutally.

They begged for their lives but the mob did not listen to them and continued to assault them. One among them is shown in the video trying to reason out with the mob that they were carrying a dead buffalo for disposal on the orders of its owner but angry cow vigilantes continued to thrash them.

Before they could be lynched, a police team reached the spot and tried to save them from the fury of the mob. In another video, cops were seeing persuading the villagers to hand them over to the police custody but the irate mob misbehaved with the cops too. Villagers alleged that they were carying cows too and had poisoned the buffalo to sell it to a meat processing plant.

After a lot of persuasion, the police finally managed to rescue four men from the clutches of the mob. Siddharth Verma, a police officer, claimed that the four men told the police that they had license for disposing of dead animals and they were called by a man in the village to dispose of his dead buffalo.

The incident took place when they loaded the dead buffalo in a pick truck and left the village. “Villagers charged them with stealing cows from the village and thrashed them. We reached in time to save their lives. A caset incident has been registered and the owner of the buffalo has been summoned to verify statements of the survived men,” said the police officer.

After cows, it was the first incident in the country involving attempts of mob lynching over a dead buffalo. It was also first incident than anywhere in the country in which cow vigilantes did not spare even Hindus.