The Twitter account of Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, is now full of tweets reporting police abuse and a possible suicide attempt.

Ian Murdock is one of the key figures in the Linux community, but the recent reports that have been posted on this Twitter account got people really worried. At this point, it's not clear whether these posts are real or if something actually happened with Ian, but the outlook is not good.

Less than 12 hours ago, Ian Murdock posted a really worrying message saying that he's going to commit suicide, and later on, he continued the series of posts by saying that he has been beaten by the police and charged with battery. It's not clear what exactly has transpired, but people are split down the middle on whether to believe the whole thing or not.

Compromised Twitter account is possible

One of the theories doing rounds is that his Twitter account got hijacked and someone is posting stuff on it. The latest tweets do not match the way he usually talks on Twitter, making this a likely scenario.

Ian Murdock currently works at Docker and people from the community have already contacted the company, also via Twitter, with the hope of getting some answers, although it looks like Docker has yet to respond.

Here are some examples of tweets:

"This was right after the female officer ripped off my underwear.. I guess that's not considered rape if you're not a woman being raped."

"The rest of my life is to fight against the police.. they are NOT friends, so don't ever ever believe otherwise."

These are some of the tamer ones, but others have various expletives or are plain racist. We can only hope that it's just a compromised Twitter account and not the work of someone in a serious state of depression. Here is the tweet that started it all:

i'm committing suicide tonight.. do not intervene as i have many stories to tell and do not want them to die with me #debian #runnerkristy67 — Ian Murdock (@imurdock) December 28, 2015