COMMOTION, riot, melee; call it what you like, but a small group of men started a fracas that could have snowballed into a serious incident if the police had not turned out in force to douse the rage built on inaccurate assumptions fanned by social media. The mob that appeared around Bukit Bintangs Plaza Low Yat over what was an outright theft that went wrong was, apparently, laced with racial connotations. Over some 24 hours a crowd grew to a mob. As the story goes, a 22-year-old man stole a cell phone from a shop in the plaza. According to police, closed-circuit television recordings showed him taking the phone and walking away when the sales representative was looking the other way. Alerted by the shouts of the salesperson, the thief was caught by a group of other men at the scene and later handed over to the plazas security personnel. His friends returned to assault the shop assistants; all based on a lie. It seemed that when the thief was caught, there was no telephone on him and on that fact the stories spun got out of hand. In fact, the thief had dropped it when he fell running away down an escalator.
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