Teen hangs self in Panchkula, Blue Whale angle suspected

PANCHKULA: A teenager hanged himself in Panchkula’s Sector 4 on Friday in a case that police suspect is linked to the Blue Whale challenge, a nefarious online game that is believed to encourage suicide and has caused panic among parents and law enforcement authorities across the country.

Karan Thakur. File photo

Rajinder Nagarkoti
Tribune News Service
Panchkula, September 25

A teenager hanged himself in Panchkula’s Sector 4 on Friday in a case that police suspect is linked to the Blue Whale challenge, a nefarious online game that is believed to encourage suicide and has caused panic among parents and law enforcement authorities across the country.

The 17-year-old, Karan Thakur — a student of DAV School, Sector 8, Chandigarh — was found hanging in his house, police said.

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The teenager’s family found drawings in his maths notebooks that suggest that he was considering ways to kill himself.

“While necessary investigations were being conducted into the matter, the parents of the boy on Monday informed us that they have found some diagrams and notes scribbled in the boy’s diary, which raised suspicion that he could have been playing the Blue Whale Challenge,” Panchuka Deputy Police Commission Manbir Singh said.

“At this point, we suspect that the boy could have been a victim of the killer online game. However, no whale image was found on the boy’s forearm,” the DCP said.

Police, however, have found nothing in the mobile phone and the notebook that could raise suspicion, but said traces of the game could have been deleted.

Blue Whale Challenge

‘Blue Whale Challenge’ is an online game that is believed to have originated in Russia, where several teenagers have killed themselves over it, believed played primarily on social media. The game starts by asking participants to draw a blue whale on a piece of paper, and later onto their own flesh. It advances innocuous challenges at first, such as waking up at unusual hours, or watching horror movies alone, but gets progressively dangerous. The administrator usually set the tasks over 50 days. The last task is suicide.

Although Russia has the highest victims, 'The Blue Whale Challenge' is also believed to have claimed lives in the UK and the US.

The name comes from the phenomenon of beached whales, a process by which the mammals strand themselves on a beach.

The creator of the game, Philipp Budeikin, was sentenced to three years of jail by a court in Russia this past July for having incited at least 16 schoolgirls to kill themselves. He is reported to have told investigators when he was arrested that he was "cleansing society". With agencies