Thrissur (Kerala) | A man was beaten up by a group of people a day ago after being allegedly caught stealing areca nuts from a house near Chelakkara in this central Kerala district and is in hospital with serious head injuries, police said on Sunday.

A senior officer of Chelakkara police station said four persons, including three members of a family, have been arrested for beating up the man.

One of the arrested persons, an areca nut trader, had found that small amounts of areca nuts had been periodically going missing from his storage for some time and had set up CCTV cameras to catch the thief, police said.

During the small hours of Saturday morning, while monitoring the CCTV footage, the trader and his family members saw the person walking away with a sack of areca nuts, it said.

They ran after him and in the midst of catching him, the alleged thief suffered injuries to his face and head, the officer said.

Subsequently, when local residents gathered there, some of them too beat up the man, police said.

Visuals of the man being beaten were also aired on TV channels.

Thereafter, someone called the police which reached the area and took the injured man to Thrissur Medical College Hospital, and he is still not out of danger, the officer said.

The incident reminds one of the Madhu lynching case where a tribal man was beaten to death by a group of men in Attappady area of Palakkad district of the state five years ago for stealing food.

Convicting and sentencing several of the accused in that case to seven years' imprisonment, a Palakkad special court had said that "moral policing cannot be encouraged in civil society." Calling it the "first mob lynching case in God's Own Country," the court had said, "Let it be the last such case." Regarding the latest incident, the police said that the areca trader had given a complaint regarding the periodic theft and his suspicions about some people in the area. "On investigating his suspicions we found that none of the persons in the area were involved in the thefts," the officer said.

The person who was caught and beaten up did not belong to that area and lived several kilometres away from there, police said.