Three men, including two sadhus from the revered Juna Akhara of Varanasi, were lynched by a mob to their death in Maharashtra’s Palghar district on 16 April around 10 pm.

The incident remained largely out of the public glare until 19 April, when videos of the lynching surfaced on the social media.

The videos show an aged man clad in saffron being escorted by a cop out of a building. A crowd wielding sticks is waiting outside. As the aged man comes out, looking scared and bleeding on the head, the crowd takes him away, easily and right under the police’s nose, and begins to beat him mercilessly.

The videos show no intervention by cops. Videos also show a group of people breaking the glass windows of a police vehicle.

It’s not that the national English media did not cover the horrific crime. Prominent newspapers such as The Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Hindu and The Indian Express carried reports in their Mumbai print editions on 18 April.

What was missing from the headlines, however, was a glaring detail that two of the three victims were sadhus – members of the largest and oldest order of sadhus in India, no less.

Chikane Maharaj Kalpavrikshgiri, 70, and Sushil Giri Maharaj, 35, belonged to the revered, Varanasi-based Shri Panch Dashnam Juna Akhara, or ‘Juna Akhara’, as it is more commonly known. The third victim, identified as Nilesh Telgane, 35, was driver of the vehicle in which the sadhus were travelling from Maharashtra to Gujarat to attend the funeral of another priest.

Here is a look at the newspapers’ headlines:

(Note that reports by The Indian Express, The Times of India and Hindustan Times carried the names of the victims in the reports, along with the information that they were priests on their way to the funeral of another priest. The Hindu carried no names but mentioned that the victims were “local religious leaders”.